I was just wondering, so often people that want to support your site often ask if you have a little button or banner that they can place on their site that they intend to link to yours, but is it better to give them the banner/button and potentially gain a couple of extra visitors because the buttons stands out more or would you gain more out of having an anchored text link to help with SERPs. Also do imagine links add anything to a site's PR and SERPs, like do they count as a general unachored inbound link?
Image links count but not as much as text links. If the site is relevant and will give you a lot of traffic then maybe an image is better than a text link. Having said that some people find text links get better click through rates than images so you just have to try it. Make sure the image uses alt text matching your keywords.
Well that really doesnt matte... you can use both text links and image links... for the image links be sure that you add the alt text as your keyword... for example what search engine sees <a href="http://www.yoursite.com"><img src="some image file add" alt="your keyword"></a> so you see that the link is coming between the image and alt text... search engines parse only the text so they see the alt text and the link .... Hope that helps Take care
So are you saying that a text link with the achor text "Home Loans" will give it's linking site the same value as an image that is linked with the alt text "Home Loans"?
yes, it will have the same weight, if not greater. In fact i recommend that you throw in some image links with alt text into your link development campaign. It looks more natural. This is with google. I'm not sure i would say the same thing for yahoo or msn.