Backlinks, ROI and SEO

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With the latest war declared by Google to webmasters that do profit of their websites by selling textual links that do pass link and PageRank juice (or rather, that do trick their algorithm) I see webmasters shaking of fear when this topic is being discussed. Okey, i understand them, it is great to remain in Google’s index and even better to have good search engine rankings, it is no harm for your site to get targeted traffic (no harm? It’s gold if you ask me).

There are only two reasons why a webmaster would buy textual links, both reasons then head over to one same point, profits. Lets take for example buying textual links to obtain better search engines rankings and drive targeted organic traffic from their position in the SERPs in hope that the traffic they will receive will turn into a paying customer. How much time and more importantly how much money is being invested to gain a decent SERPs position that will drive 100-200 unique visitors a day? Is it worth? This really depends from the type of the website you have. If your website is selling products or services, having great search engine ranking position that will drive a good amount of laser targeted traffic will most likely turn in real gold and your business will have a huge bounce (unless your website design lacks in “call to action”).

The second reason webmasters buy textual links is the traffic. Advertising your website on another related website (i.e. advertise your web hosting business in a web hosting forum or webmaster forum) will bring you that targeted traffic since both websites share the same concept (one is offering services and the other is surviving from your advertisements), in that same hope that these visitors will turn into paid customers (and again, unless your website design lacks in “call to action”).

The question that raises to me is, do these webmasters buy links just for fun of buying and without any clue what their goals to achieve are with these backlinks? Do they calculate their ROI (Return On Investment) on their purchased backlinks or their reason to purchase links is only to get high search engine rankings because they have heard that its cool?

When you get involved with search engine optimization or search engine marketing or call it the way you want you should be aware of what your goals are and you should exactly know what and why you are doing. With this same rules are (or rather should be) treated investments on advertising (textual or banner), you should have a close look at where your money is going, what do you expect the return to be for that advertisement (monetary or simply regular readers) but the money you spend should totally make sense to you why it was spent.

Lets take for example me and this SEO Blog. For me it will make no sense to spend $500 monthly on advertising and promoting this blog unless you can draw back that investment in some way, and the options would be two (actually three)

1. Offering SEO Services – And my answer is NO. Offering seo services is time consuming and for me the monetary return for the time involved would not be enough. There are other ways that require less working hours and with the same profits (more or less). It would also ruin the whole nature of this blog.
2. Private advertising – Most likely possible.
3. Generating Sale Through Affiliates – Which is what I am actually doing to maintain the costs of teh site and the experiments

Spending $500 for promoting this blog and offering seo services would be killing the blogs nature automatically. This is a SEO blog that provides free seo tutorials to prove you that you can do search engine optimization too (but always reminding you that it requires patience, hard work and lots of hard work). Said this, the ROI for ME on that investment would be $0. Where I would have a Return In Investment (or rather a personal satisfaction) would be to invest the $500 in a seo experiment (purchasing a software and reviewing it for you as valid seo source or just waste of money, hiring a seo company and reviewing it for you on the results and what can be learned from their interventions).

As far as it regards backlinks, as long as every single backlink to this site will be delivering a visitor which will turn into a regular reader is a great ROI in the long run (with or without the nofollow on the link). And you, why are you involved in backlinks and SEO, what are your real goals?

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