Many industries such as travel, pharmacy, pornography, and gaming have search results which are hyper competitive and require heavy advertising or aggressive SEO techniques. Some niche websites may see an even greater ROI on smart link rentals since many of their competitors may not include link renting in their online marketing budgets.

Some rented links provide great value in direct targeted traffic, whereas some other links provide greater value from effect they have on search relevancy.

Most links are rented on a monthly basis with an option to renew at end of month. Some link prices can be as low as a few dollars a month whereas some can cost thousands per month.

There is no singular one-size-fits-all way to directly assume value of a link. Most effective marketing has risks associated with it, but you can minimize risks and maximize your return by breaking value of link down into its elements:

1. Direct traffic from link renting 2. Viral effect of advertising 3. Effects of link rentals on search relevancy.

1. Direct Traffic from Link Renting:

Link renting can drive significant direct traffic. The first things you need to know are:

* what is quality level of traffic? * how related is this audience to my product? * how much traffic does site receive?

What is Quality Level of Traffic:

Where does bulk of their traffic come from? Someone recently asked about ePilot, pay per click search engine, at Search Engine Watch forums. Andrew Goodman replied "The first question I would ask myself would be: 'where does ePilot's traffic come from?' Answer isn't clear? Then it would be no surprise that so-called traffic doesn't convert to anything."

This same concept holds true with any site. If you do not see any quality inbound links that could indicate a problem: or they could get most of their traffic from pay-per-click ads. Whatever case, if you are going to spend money renting links for traffic, make sure you know where their traffic comes from.

How Related is Audience:

It will be somewhat of a guesstimate as to how exactly how related traffic will be, but generally it is fairly obvious when something is on theme or off theme. Some things you may want to consider when determining traffic quality:

* What is mood / mind set of their traffic? Related traffic may not be traffic that converts. At 2004 Webmaster World Las Vegas Conference a speaker mentioned that a website about prom hairstyles may not be a good place to advertise prom dresses since girls do not usually look at prom hairdos until after they have already purchased their prom dresses. * What product should I advertise? Sometimes it makes sense to send traffic to your home page while other times it is more logical to advertise a specific product because it is hot or more related to that particular audience.

How Much Traffic Does Site Receive:

Most honest webmasters who sell ad space understand that traffic they receive is a large part of their ad value and should have no problems giving you that information.

Some systems such as Alexa also track traffic, but their statistics can be inaccurate due to their limited distribution.. The best way to use such systems is not for traffic estimates but for comparisons between sites. Note that Alexa has a heavy bias toward webmaster resource type sites. Additionally other companies such as Hitwise may provide more accurate traffic statistics.

Imagine a situation where you have started a great site with exceptional design and high quality content. Your pagerank of course is zero and you alexa traffic rank is somewhere in 18th lack or perhaps more. You want to bring visitors to your site and hence want it included in search results but search bots are taking their own time caching your site. Finally googlebot caches your site and you say, what heck, I am through. But to your dismay you find your site way deep down even for a non competitive keyword.

You feel a bit down but have belief that getting some quality inbound links will solve issue. You start reaching sites with your link request but alas no one seems to be answering. Of course they want a link from a site having a good PR and not with a site having a PR of zero irrespective of quality. In fact quality just doesn't seem to matter in today's internet which is all but pagerank. If your site has a good page rank you are king or else no one is ever going to bother about you.