Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Picking A Link Building Service: A Guide

By Dan Duvano

Search engine marketing or SEO is a complex process, but a big part of it is link building. This is often referred to as off page optimization and includes a large number of different activities.

You can conduct all the different link building activities yourself, but this is generally too time consuming for most peoples tastes, so eventually you'll need to engage a link building service.

Here are several helpful tips that will help you out when hiring link building services.

Tip #1 - Make Sure they Provide Linking Diversity

A key element of effective link building is to make it very natural in appearance. This means you need to have links from a wide range of sources, not just a huge number of links all from one method. A good service will make use of a variety of tactics to provide link popularity.

Tip #2 - Are They Up On Recent Methods

Your next question for the prospective link building service should be on how update they are with current methods. Ask what methods they use, what publications they read, how they know the methods are working etc

Tip #3 - Make Sure The Links Are Kosher

Of course why you want the best possible link building from the company you hire, you want to make sure that the links are ethical. Make sure that the company has a good reputation and that they only use ethical links. You don't want links that are going to look like spam and actually harm the reputation of your website in the future. So ensure that the service you use only uses ethical link building tactics.

Tip #4 - Find A Service Others Recommend

A good place to find out about link building services is to ask around on forums. Find out what services others have used, what they paid for them, what results they got, were they happy, are they still using them etc. This will give a very quick idea on the quality of a service.

Tip #5 - Get References

Find out if the company will let you speak to previous clients and ask them what they thought. If possible verify that these are real clients and not just props. The company may list their own testimonials on the site and these are well worth reading.

Tip #6 - Check Out Who Links To Them

Find out who is linking to the link service themselves. If they are really good in the industry, then they should have looked after themselves well. If you can't find reasonable numbers of incoming links then they may not be as good as they pretend.

Tip #7 - Compare Prices

Pricing for different link building services will vary a lot. Make sure you put the prices in perspective with the other factors though. If the service seems to cheap to be true - it probably is! Ask yourself what your budget is, and then find the best you can within that. Don't go for the cheapest just to save money.

Finding top link building services is important, but not always easy. However, with these tips in mind, your search becomes a little easier. So, make sure that you work hard to find a company that will provide you with the link building services that will make a difference in the quality of your site and the traffic that you get coming in on a regular basis. - 15478

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