With more & more companies/individuals requiring to market their websites in the organic search results, obviously there’s going to be a higher demand for on-page & off-page seo services. Many of us now can build a website, regardless of whether it’s developed as a relevant & search engine friendly resource or not… (i’ll move onto this subject at a later date!).

Focusing on link building services, the problem lies with how much people are actually willing to spend. The current trend tends to be pointing towards many of these affordable link building companies that are located in countries such as India. I am very aware that a good percentage of these companies are professional & reliable and also deliver a well executed service, but on the other hand some of these so called “affordable SEO Firms” can be a complete knightmare and a total waste of money. A few years ago I outsourced a small link building project to one of these companies & it ended up me having to re-do all the project at a loss. The links that they built were done so using a variation of black-hat methods, one of them being link cloaking. The over-all service was completely terrible.

This is really just one example of how these firms are giving the SEO industry a bad name, but as the old saying goes – “what you get is what you pay for”. I still continue to develop links myself, I don’t necessarily believe in link buying & always stress the importance of why it is important to develop links naturally, create great content & others will link to it.

When it comes to choosing a link building service, think of it as an investment that will grow your online presence. Link building when done properly is a very professional job, so be prepared to spend a realistic amount & in the long-term you can expect a good return on your investment.

As most of you are probably aware, anchor text is an extremely important factor when building links. You have to determine how you use your keywords with the full effect, over using or being too aggressive can lead to potential problems with your Google rankings, but when it comes to Bing you can take that extra risk & step up your aggression level.

I think we tend to over-look anchor text on too many occasions, time after time I have seen poorly written anchor links, whether they come across too aggressive or just generally too spammy – it’s all good practice to go back to basics every now & then, no matter how advanced link building has become.

If you want to rank high in the real world, you need people who say that you are good. On the Internet, if you want to rank high in search engines, you also need “votes”, just like in the real world. You need people to say that you are good. If you have enough people saying that you are good, the search engines will rank you higher. This is where backlinks come in. Backlinks are like votes, they tell the search engines that you are good. The more “votes” or, backlinks you get, the better you will rank in the search engines.

Also, many people think that all links were equal. This is not always true. There are some sites that are, in the eyes of the search engines more important or respected. Just like in the real world, if the President said that you were good, people would value that much more than if a hobo said that you are good. A good way to see how important or respected a site is in the eyes of the search engines is by looking at their Google Page Rank. This is a scale from 0 to 10 telling you how important a site is. Google is 10 and Facebook are Page Rank 10, other sites like Wikipedia, MySpace and Adobe are Page Rank 9 and so it goes.

The more links you get from high Page Rank sites, the higher your chances of good search engine rankings are.

The easiest way to get a lot of valuable backlinks is to hire a link building service. They can get you the links you need. Also, they will know where to find the high Page Rank websites where they can get backlinks that will help you rank better.

photo credit: jeanbaptisteparis

Here is where you get .edu backlinks - kind of

Let’s first look at why you want to have backlinks from universities and such. The major search engines assign a rank for any given keyword based in part on the number of links that are pointing to that web site. With major search engines I mean Bing, Google and Yahoo.

And when I say in part, that is true for Google and Yahoo. Bing actually ranks web sites mostly based on the number of links. But the sheer number of links is one side of the coin. The other side is the quality of your backlinks. It is commonly agreed that Universities and educational facilities are trustworthy (The truth is they are not, but that is a different topic).

Anyhow, Google & Co. “think” they are trustworthy. So they have programmed their algorithms to give links from .edu domains a higher value. Whether this is true or not: You are the judge. Do your own research if in doubt.

Here is how to get these fruits: Head over to Google.com and squeeze the information out of that beast with a customized search query:

site:.edu inurl:blog "YOUR KEYWORD GOES HERE" "post a comment" -"Comments to this post are now closed" -"you must be logged in”

Here is what this search query means:

site:.edu You are looking for web site that have .edu in the URL

inurl:blog You also want sites that are blogs. On .edu domains these blogs are very often in the directory “blog”

“YOUR KEYWORD GOES HERE” Part of the search should be your keyword, as you want to post your comments on related blogs only.

“post a comment” If a web site has a comment submission form, they usually have this or a similar wording.

-”Comments to this post are now closed” It is very annoying to read a post and come up with a nice relevant comment, only to find out after you’ve hit the submit button, that the comments on this particular post have been closed 2 years ago or so. So, we filter this out with the minus sign in front of it.

-”you must be logged in” I am a little lazy, so I try to avoid blogs where I have to first create an account and then I can post. If at all possible, I prefer blogs that allow immediate comment submission.

Sounds not to difficult, huh? Just go ahead and give it a spin.

Why am I writing this post? Well, I hope that you would like to know how it is being done, but that your time is beeter invested in other things and you decide to hire me for your .edu link building.

So, to make a long story short, here’s the deal:

I find .edu blogs related to your web site and post some nice comments there for you. Leaving a link back to your site with your keyword as anchor text.

One way to get contextual links is to cherry pick web sites

One method to get contextual links is to cherry pick potential link partners. You find a web site that would be a good fit and then you give the web master a call and arrange to get a link to your web site placed on that web site.

In exchange you can offer to write an article about that web site and publish it, or write a press release or design some kind of link bait grafic that they can place on their web site.

Basically you persuade or bribe the other web master to place your link. Make sure that you only do this very selectively. If you overdo it, one of your target web masters might get very annoyed and might decide to report you to Google for link buying effort.

While you basically pay for the link here with an article or something else, this would not exactly be considered to buy backlinks by Google. But if you do this on a regular basis with hundreds of web masters, you will get in hot water quickly.

The lightest for of contextual link building is to place comments on related blogs and web sites. You will get a link back to your site with your keyword as the anchor text. That the link is not directly within the blog post does not really matter. As long as the main content of the page is related to your site, you will be fine. You need to make sure that the link does not have the nofollow attribute, or it will not count as a real link in Google’s eyes. Blog comment link building is probably the most economic form of contextual link building.

Another way to get contextual links is to find blogs related to your niche or industry and do guest posts on these blogs. Sometimes you will find a link on these blogs for guest posts and some terms and conditions that explain the process. In other cases you have to contact the web master either via email, phone or sometimes by just writing a comment on the blog.

Guest posts will give you contextual links and if you pick blogs that have authority, you will not only get a good improvement in ranking, but you will also get direct traffic and in some cases some kind of indirect endorsement of your web site. This alone is probably worth a lot more than the contextual links that you got from the guest post.

To sum it up: Yes, contextual link building is definitely worth the effort. You will get links with the best possible quality plus direct traffic and indirect endorsement of your products and services.

Here is what Google says about paid links:

Buying or selling links that pass PageRank can dilute the quality of search results. If you believe a site is engaged in buying or selling links that pass PageRank, please tell us about it. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

Google even has a form to report paid links that were bought or rented in order to get PageRank.

Now building lings or hiring a link building service is a different story. You can build as many links as you want and it is completely fine with Google, as long as you follow their webmaster guidelines. The truth of the matter is, that Google actually encourages you to build a better web site that is more user friendly and to build more pages and to publish articles and so build more links.

Building links, like building web sites and adding content is mainly a lot of work. You can reduce your work load by hiring a link building service. But make sure that the link building company that you hire knows what they are doing and that they know the rules and follow them.

To state it a little different: To buy backlinks is completely fine, if you consider hiring a link building service as your means of buying links. To buy links or buy .edu backlinks by renting links on other web sites is very risky business and should not be done. One report from your competition and you will see all your rankings tumble.

Pros of using automated link building software
Saves time
If you have busy schedule and you want to make sure you popularize your site quickly, you can make use of the software to do it for you.

Quick loading directory
You can choose the categories as to where you want to place your content in the directory and then the software will add site information and web address automatically.

Automatic emails
An editable template is provided which can customized as per your need and sent to the webmasters.

Contacts
The software will effectively find all your contacts even the ones you don’t remember and send links to your site.

Cons of using automated link building software
If you have come across an email several times with almost the same content that asks you to do link exchange, you can understand that it was sent by means of a link building software. “Dear Sir/Madam: You have an interesting website, lets exchange link…” or “Hi, what an attractive website you have…” Such emails are likely to be ignored.

Even though manually creating inbound links may seem to be a waste of time and energy, you will end up creating high quality links rather than creating hundreds of low quality ones by means of the software that are eventually going to be ignored.

If the search engines come to know that you are using software for building links, you will lose PageRank and visibility on search engine.

1. The main motive of link building is to drive more traffic to your website or blog.

2. People mainly make use of search engines like Google and Yahoo to find any information. Link building will help your site to get more visibility on search engines.

3. Your website will become more popular because your site is visible on various places like article directories, social networking sites, blogs, forums, newsletters, etc.

4. The more efforts you put in improving your link building strategies, the better will be chances of your site being listed in the top ten sites on the search engine.

5. It is one of the cheapest ways of promoting your site.

Link building is a famous search engine optimization (SEO) strategy that has successfully many website owners to popularize their websites.

Since inbound clicks lead to your website, you need to make sure that your site not only looks attractive but has everything that can keep the visitor engaged in your website.

Keep in mind that link building will surely bring in more people to checkout your site; however your site should be interesting enough for people to visit it again and again. You can make your site interesting by posting informative content, giving of discounts and offers, etc.

Quality link locations are like these are available whatever theme your site is in, whether it relates to SEO Las Vegas or online shopping – you can be sure that you’ll get relevant back-links.

Contextual link building is one of the newest ways of promoting your website. It is done by placing links in the content in such a way that a reader is enticed to click on it. This can be done by submitting articles on article submission websites.

All you need to do is write interesting and unique articles that can be about 300 to 500 words and submit them on famous article directories such as ezinearticles.com and articlesbase.com. The article should also have a catchy title such as ‘How to lose weight in 2 weeks in a healthy way’. The more interesting the title you have for your article, the better will be the chances of it being read.

In such article directories, there is a section called author box or resource box that is usually found at the end of the article. You need to place a call-to-action sentence in this area with a hyperlink to your website such as ‘To know more about how you can lose weight in 2 weeks, click here’. You can hyperlink the words ‘click here’ so that people who want to know more can click on it and visit your site.

Make sure you make use of keywords in your article and free of grammatical errors. The article should start with an interesting title and proceed with even more interesting article and then at the end of the article, the reader should feel the urge to read by clicking on the provided link. Also make sure you have an attractive and informative website that can meet the reader’s requirements.

If you haven’t heard of link wheels or aren’t familiar with them, then it’s a good thing. It’s not a strategy that you need to regret about if you haven’t used it. Link wheels are not the only things that are being pushed out into the market these days that claim to immediately shoot your rankings through the roof. There are tons of “get rich quick” scams on the web. The same theory applies to SEO. Building smart link wheels is all about going the right way, the traditional way. And what’s that? By not doing what the others are doing when it comes to building these wheels.

It’s important for you to know about the old method of link wheel building so that you don’t accidentally fall into the trap. In the web 2.0 world, you have multiple sites where you can submit your articles or blogs where you have your links going back to both, the main domain name and the other site. This “other site” is just another web 2.0 website that has been set up by you, by following the exact same steps. This wheel of 2 links can grow and expand to a good extent. It can go up to 30+ link long. The whole point of doing this is to not only promote your main site but also to promote these web 2.0 sites, which gives you lots of link juice to play around with.

There are different variations of the link wheel but ultimately all of them do the same thing. It’s not wrong to have a few such sites going through this process, but it’s important to check your wheel and make sure it’s not in a circle, which would be easy to detect. Wheels that are irregular and are broken can’t be found that easily. On the other hand, spin off wheels are the most powerful as they are almost impossible to discover.

Now that we know how it’s done, it’s simple to understand that the risk goes low if you build the wheel properly. Broken wheels that have lots of hubs will just look natural and be impossible for any search engine to track this technique and stop it. Setting up a link wheel properly can be an expensive affair but can give great results. You can eventually land up on the top of your chosen search results and stay there for years without any need for real updating or grabbing new backlinks.

Although stopping your back linking process is not a good idea, unless you’re really cash-trapped. There are many companies out there who offer link wheel building services, but it’s important that you find one that offers a reliable service, since you don’t want your site to be blacklisted. To make sure things are genuine, just give them a call and talk to a real person who can answer your questions. The company needs to be really on the track with the latest tactics and SEO news. Just use this information to go about your link wheel building campaigns carefully and you should be fine.