Sunday, October 4, 2009

Are High-Cost Link Building Services Dead?

By Daniel McGonagle

Times have changed. There was a time when the only way you could get effective backlinks was by hiring an expert SEO firm. That is no longer the only way. Today you can get effective backlinks (and lots of them) very easily. You would think this might be a slap for the big SEO firms and Linkbuilding services, but they still have fees of 4 figures per month and remarkably people are still paying them.

Here are some reasons why you don't need to hire an expensive linkbuilding service or SEO firm. Some of these reasons and methods may still require outsourcing if your budget allows for that, but they can all be done manually too. Once you see what's available to you for cheaper yet still effective services, you'll never think of hiring a firm to handle your search engine optimization for you ever again.

The two most important factors for ranking well in the search engines are off-page and on-page optimization (what else is there, really?). Since the Internet is always changing, the search engines are also constantly changing their algorithms and formulas for ranking sites well because it is in the best business interest to do so. As they keep changing the rules you need to stay abreast of these rules in order to stay competitively ranked and while the top SEO firms are well aware of these changes, you can stay on top of what works by getting involved in your rankings efforts personally or hiring in-house company staff to do it for your company.

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.

If you're a sole proprietor of an Internet business or looking to expand your company's offline presence onto the web, you need to see a fast return on your investment. The best way to do that is to keep your fingers "in the pie" so to speak. Staying involved and having a lot of control over what your search engine optimization efforts are will have the two-fold benefit of teaching you what really works and this is a skill that all companies should build up in order to stay competitive in their industries, and essential for sole proprietors to see income being produced from their search engine optimization efforts.

You can find several linkbuilding services that can develop backlinks at far less cost than the high-end services. One of these is My Article Network . Use your cash carefully in times of economic distress. All businesses strive to do more with less time and less cost.

Gone are the days when you could just dish out cash to a big SEO firm to enhance your brand visibility online. Today, companies need to be creative with their staff. Nurture different skills and get more people involved with web exposure. Some of them surf regularly anyhow. Find out who the good writers are and get them to submit informative articles or posts about your niche to My Article Network . Be creative with your staff and improve your online presence.

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