Benefits And Drawbacks Of Integrating Text Links And Image Ads
Benefits And Drawbacks Of Integrating Text Links And Image Ads
In the mind of many visitors, one of two types of links get used more often. Text links are called those that string together a word, phrase or sentence that's hyperlinked to another domain. And image ads are things like banners, button, and pictures graphical images that are hyperlinked with a URL. These two types of links have their benefits and drawbacks.
Text links help search engine spiders find, crawl and index all the webpages in your website, and if they did not, that is the search engines can not find your webpages, these will not show up in the search results. Also, text links help search engines understand the topic of link destination and search engines spiders do not recognize text contained in images. And although there are ways to help spiders understand the content of image links, text links are the preferred method.
On the other hand, unlike traditional online graphical ads, image ads can be matched to a page's content and this targeting makes image ads more attractive and relevant to anyone browsing the site. So, image ads offer you another way to increase your business exposure and reach new prospects.
What type of links you use, will be based on your site and your traffic, and clearly, you will benefit from testing both types to find out which one performs best with your particular demographic. In general, text ads tend to pull a lot more clicks than image ads, since, perhaps you've heard many times how people are becoming "banner blind", ignoring banners because they know they are ads.
Almost every website has text ads, and these are harder to ignore. This is one of the reasons why AdSense is so successful. If your site is primarily text, you could make it more appealing through the use of a few graphical banners, and make some money in the process.
Banners with a clear call to action, are the ones you should choose, such as attractive banners that clearly state "Click here for ____!" Don't think that every new internet user realizes that he can click directly on graphics, so it is important for banners to have this kind of call-to-action.
But be careful not to overdo the ads on your site. Two or three graphics per page is plenty. If you add more than this, you risk your site looking like a banner farm, making visitors decide to leave before reading your content.
Text links, on the other hand, besides being more effective than banners generally, can be blended in with your content, looking more like recommendations than ads. Remember that many people prefer to buy through recommendations rather than blatant ads, so text links will help you get a higher click-through-ratio than you might get with banner ads.
How do you code a text link? Very simple: you create a text link in your site by using the "a href" code. A simple text link code might look something like this:
rel="nofollow" onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/outgoing/article_exit_link']);" href=http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?I=4oQCI&m=LCTm4NtePcWewy&b=k07hkY39EzoB8ojEbnVRYA>Here's where the text you want hyperlinked will go.
Coding a banner link is only slightly more complex. You still use the "a href" code, but you also have to use the "img src" code along with it. It should look something like this:
rel="nofollow" onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/outgoing/article_exit_link']);" href="http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?I=4oQCI&m=LCTm4NtePcWewy&b=k07hkY39EzoB8ojEbnVRYA>
Share:
">http://www.yourdomain.com/images/banner1.jpg>
That first website address in that piece of code, is the URL where you want your traffic to go. The second one is the URL where the image is being hosted on your server. This will make the image show up and when the user hovers his or her mouse over it they'll see that it's clickable.
And finally, do test your links to be sure they're going to the right place. If you accidentally link to the wrong place, you could end up losing money in commissions or sales, so it is very important to make sure your links are working correctly.
G Calvo