If you are buying links, then what is the best value? Are you paying a lot of bloggers to talk about you on low page rank websites, or fewer to give your website some buzz on higher ranking web-sites?

The problem is that it is not always clear from a page rank, or a count of incoming links, merely how popular a website is. Even a low ranking site may have thousands of unique daily traffic, whereas merely because a weblog has a huge page rank does not guarantee any visitors per day.

So, if you might, looking at the visitors stats is a extraordinary starting point to going for where to place your adverts. But, this only works if the blogs that you are advertising on are highly relevant to your theme and can send you some of their visitors.

But a lot of advertisers are more interested in the search engine benefits of buying links. Rightly or wrongly, this is the case. So, what are the best links?

Well once more, links from a relevant page on a site are always much better than links from a completely different theme of page. The major search engines are thought to differentiate between links that are on relevant pages and links that are from a random page. But even links from off topic pages might work, merely not as well.

Then, of course, a link from a page of, for instance, a page rank 4 page are more beneficial than from a lower page rank page. But how much so? Well, as a rule the consensus is that a link on a page is worth about 3 – 5 times the value (in search ranking terms) of a link on a page of 1 rank below it. So, if you buy 4 links on a PR3 page, you have roughly the same search engine benefits as 1 link on a PR4 page.

But, what does that mean if you are paying bloggers to post round you? Well, roughly speaking, you would expect a well ranking blog to result in your advert being placed on a post with some sort of page rank, whilst one without a rank is virtually without doubt not going to have a ranking on the post pages.

We’ll also look at typical costs. For a 100 word advert on a PR0 website, you might be look at paying the blogger about $1.50. For a PR1 blog the fee may be $2.50 and for PR2 $5. OK, the home page’s Page Rank does not always correlate to the post page’s rank, but you might see that at these levels, for paying round twice the price, you are actually getting 3 – 5 times the value.

So surprisingly, paying more for less links could be better. Of course, buy loads of links and you might be lucky and get in early on a site that will in future become a very well ranked site. An exceptional low host high value link, but not guaranteed.

So, for the best value links, look for sites that can place themed posts that have a good page rank. They might cost more, but the value you get back should be even better.

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