Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Deciding On A Link Building Service

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

The first thing to look for when trying to find a top quality link building service is whether or not they provide linking diversity. You don't want a service that only specializes in one type of link building, such as blog posts. If you're going to pay for the service, look for companies that will provide a variety of different methods of building up quality links for the best results.

Tip #2 - Is The Service Well Updated

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 Someone with a Great Reputation

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

Take the time to get references from the company you are considering. Find out who they have worked for previously so you can get some references. Talk to the company about references and more than likely a good company will be able to supply them. Although they can't provide information about their clients, they can provide references.

Tip #6 - Check Out the Links to Their site

A credible link building service should obviously be well linked to itself. One of the biggest tests you can perform is to simply see how many people are linking to their site - if its a lot then they probably do a decent job.

Tip #7 - How Much Is A Link Worth?

Price isn't the be all and end all, as a cheap service may not be value for money if they links are poor, and a dear service may pay for itself in a month! Once you have other assessments of the service though, then you can compare pricing. Prices will vary widely, so the first question is probably, 'how much are you willing to pay?'

Link building is important, so who you get to do it is therefore important too. Hopefully the tips above have given you some direction is sorting through the many providers, and will allow you to make an informed decision soon.

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