"As for buying text links, who is reputable?"
- In my experience, you should determine how much you can spend per month for this. Then, go after 1 or 2 "Big" links. By this I mean for your site, if it were possible to get a link from Victoria's Secret, that would certainly help your site.
From a search engine perspective, a link from VS to your site only validates your site in the eyes of the search engine that your site is extremely relevant to s*xy gowns (or whichever text link you used) and that will greatly boost your rankings.
In this part of the game, VS already has the name brand user already looking for them, so you need to comepete based on product, not brand name, that's why it makes sense to get a link from them.
Here are some link brokers where you can find available sites:
http://www.textlinkbrokers.com/
http://www.text-link-ads.com/
http://www.linkadage.com
I also have a list of
seo resources that I use at the following url:
http://seoresources.seoforgoogle.com/
Let me know if you have any other questions!
- Paul