Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Are High-Cost Link Building Services Dead?

By Daniel McGonagle

Back in the early days online, the only way you could get effective backlinks was to hire an SEO firm, but that's not the case anymore. Nowadays, effective backlinks (and lots of them) can be generated, obtained and made use of very easily. This should be affecting the larger, more expensive SEO firms and linkbuilding services, but they're still charging 4 figures a month for these services and they're getting it, too!

So you want some reasons why you don't need to hire an expensive linkbuilding service or SEO firm? Of course you do. Now understand, some methods might still need some outsourcing if your budget permits that, but you can still do it all yourself by hand. I am sure that once you understand what you can do for a lot less money but equally effective service, you will never want to hire a search engine firm to do your SEO again.

Ok, you know there are 2 essential parts to ranking well in search engines, right? Off-page and On-page. Optimization in both categories. (What else is there, really?). Search engines change their formulas for ranking as the Internet changes. That is their business. You need to be informed about the changing rules to be competitive. You already know the Big SEO companies are tuned in to them. You keep on top of it either by watching and listening and reading yourself or you hire someone in-house on your staff to do it for you.

Two things are making on-page optimization increasingly important: Latent Semantic Indexing and Silo Site Structure Design. These are critically important for your rankings. Latent Semantic Indexing, or LSI is a fancy term that means your sites will rank well if your site content is using the terms commonly associated with that topic. Silo site structures design means organizing your sites in a way that rewards the human visitors and readers with an easy to navigate site. Doing these two things is simply solid SEO. It means you'll need fewer backlinks for better rankings.

When it comes to off-page optimization, you can use a low-cost link building service to generate backlinks from relevant sites and the number of backlinks you get can be in the thousands. The problem with most of these low-cost linkbuilding services is that they get "tapped out" after a while so in most cases you are advised to use a new service every 6 months to continue seeing results. There are a lot of these types of services out there now and they build backlinks for you just as effectively but at a far lower cost. Those savings to you can be used to hire writers and site designer, thereby making your SEO efforts and linkbuilding campaigns see a positive Return on Investment (ROI) a lot sooner than usual.

Are you the sole proprietor of an Internet business? Or do you need to expand your company's offline presence onto the web? If so, you need a fast return on your investment. This will help you discover what works and give you a skill that every company ought to improve just to remain competitive. As a sole proprietor, this is absolutely essential. So, stay directly involved and manage your owun search engine optimization efforts.

There are linkbuilding services out there that can develop backlinks at far less cost that the high-end services that are servicing clients right now. A look around at some fine reviews on backlinking services will show you many affordable alternatives. For example, Linkvana is well worth its membership fee for the backlinks they build for your company. You must be inventive in the economic climate today in order to stay competitive and fiscally solvent.

No more can you afford to pour money into SEO firms just to "expand the brand" for your companies and businesses. Now many companies are utilizing their employees in many different ways. Multi-tasking and getting your employees involved with web exposure is a great way to do more with the same amount of employees. Coach some of your employees to get them to submit informative articles or posts about your niche to Backlink Solutions . That is one way you can expect to increase web exposure for your company.

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