What is link building and what you should look for when deciding on selecting the different link building services and link building packages available. The wrong choice can actually harm your website by getting it banned from the search engines.

The Golden Standard In Link Building Services

Author: Anton Cox

Avoid Google SEO Penalties: Which Link Building Services Are Gold?

When focusing your online marketing efforts on link building, it’s quality, not quantity that provides the strong foundation from which other links can be built. Link building services are like panning for gold. The prospector must know gold when he sees it (sites with a high amount of traffic in a related industry are a great start). The prospector must know where to look (starting with the DMOZ and Yahoo directory) and what to do with the raw nuggets he finds (Submit the website, get listed in the directory or email the webmaster) in order to make or request a valuable one-link that will catch the eye of search engines.

There are 3 parts to the gold standard of link building.

1. Link building services that deal in multiple reciprocal links are ‘fools’ gold. Most back links that you pay for have little or no value. There's a myth among marketers that “more is better" but many back links can actually undermine your site's ranking. Most people believe the following is true:

“Buying back links is an easy and quick way to the top. It is expensive, but you will get a high Page Rank. You will not spend the many hours of dull link building work” – This is entirely false.

Firstly, Page Rank is an unreliable indicator of a pages value. If you are a PR1 then, in theory, aiming to link with sites that have a higher PR is wise, but it isn’t a one way path to the top. Google openly admits they ‘play’ with the data and it is ‘inaccurate’. Secondly, buying links is a big No! Google is quite rightly rejecting the practice of buying links to enhance your website. Google engineers monitor the top ranking sites for competitive keywords and if they slightly suspect link buying has been involved in your position, you can be penalised, even banned.

This, however, does not mean that you cannot buy the services that help create the most valuable links of all; one-way theme links.

What is a one-way theme link?

Theme equals ‘content’ which includes written content, video, audio anything that adds considerable value to the search results. One-way = your link embedded within quality content/information, then publishing on the web for the general public to access.

The pitfall is that many website owners get swept along with buying link building packages at the lowest price and this puts your website into an inescapable trap. The easier the link is to create, the lower the cost, the lower the cost the lower the value. Google isn’t going to make it easy for you to get links. They want to see you offer ‘value’ along with your links. Your website will probably get blacklisted by Google if you follow the cheapest option. The ‘fools gold’ of link building services is having many thousands of links originating from the same place or from worthless reciprocal link farms or from links created with other website that have no value in Google’s eyes. Google frowns on the practice of multiple back links pointing to a site from just one source. Particularly if the originating site has poor content value, loads of links and a low Page Rank. This is a characteristic failing of ‘link exchanges’ aka ‘Link Farms’ and their link building packages. Google spots these a mile away and will penalise their ranking. Reciprocal links are worthless now as a strategic move, however, tactically they still have their value, it’s better to have a reciprocal link with a high traffic site, then to have nothing at all. So simply linking up to a link exchange script is not only ineffective but also is damaging to your site, particularly if you don’t take the time to assess the value of each site before offering your link to a webmaster or blog owner.

2. Link building services that give you only ‘natural’ links are solid gold. What makes a good natural link may sounds obscure at first, but knowledge of your marketplace, in particular, your customer, helps identifying keywords to include on your website, also known as, on-page optimisation. They keywords provide considerable insight into this industry terminology and allow you to cater your content to the needs and desires of your market. To create the most valuable of links – theme link – involves using a combination of entertaining and informative copywriting (just like this) that solves and quenchers the target markets thirst for knowledge and integrating these keywords – this should be done for each page of your website. Only after that process is completed do you start building links to your website.

Sites that widely promote the trading of links should be avoided at all costs. Google looks for authentic, natural and organically developed back links. Sooner rather than later they will detect artificial links such as those that are openly traded. The obvious link trading networks are easy link partners for first-timers due to the structure of these networks they are wide open to discovery by Google engineers, once the engineers find these sites, they find you links as well, follow them and thus all parties involved are affected, even disqualified by Google.

3. Link building services that give you permanent back links are worth their weight in gold. Back links are critical to SEO and traffic generation. If you are going to invest into a one-way link building campaign, you must get a return on that investment. Steer well clear of subscription back links that take a monthly or quarterly fee for maintaining your ranking. Only ever pay for permanent one-way links. There is only one thing worse than not having a low search engine standing and that is losing your previously good search engine standing.

If you think that getting a solid gold link building service is just a matter of getting out your cheque book, think again. You need to make sure your website is optimised with the correct keywords, and then you embark on a one-way theme-link building campaign. That’s it! The fools gold links, reciprocal links and buying links, can seriously damage your websites marketing efforts. As with all things in life, it is more about quality rather than quantity that customers appreciate and Google rewards you for focusing on.

About the Author:

Anton Cox is senior project manager at World SEO. World SEO provides reliable link building services by offering several bespoke link building packages to website owners and SEO agencies wanting to enhance their web presence and win more visitors to their website.
Visit www.worldseo.co.uk to find out more about our link building services.

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