Most articles written about SEO (including my own) tend to point to one important factor: incoming links. Links, links, links! All you need is links! Easy, but how do you get them? There are hundreds of techniques for link building; none are particularly easy, most are time consuming and some are tedious and unrewarding.

Manual link building

One of the most tedious and unrewarding ways (and also the most common) is picking through websites by hand, finding the ones with good PageRank, removing those that are in competition with you, and emailing them. Yawn.

Manual link building services

There are many companies out there that offer to do this for you. One company, Content Now, offer 500 link solicitations for £150.

That figure instantly raises 2 questions to my mind, reading their FAQ’s I find the answers:

Q. What does “number of solicitations” mean?
A. The number of solicitations refers to the number of email requests we will send out on a monthly basis on your behalf.

Q. What is your average conversion rate from solicitations to actual links gained?
A. On average it is between 2% and 4%. It tends to vary due to the sector and the quality of the client’s website.

2-4% = 10-20 links = £25-£50 per link

Bear in mind however, that these are reciprocal links, and so aren’t worth as much in the eyes of the search engines.

Link bait

Another method link building is link bait. Link baiting is where you write an article to attract links, whether that is a resource, a useful guide, something funny etc. If successful, people consider this link bait important enough to post on their blog, social bookmark etc. and this builds links.

Link bait service

A company offering a link bait service is The SEO Company. Their website highlights one success story where one article “now has over 600 links, around 30-40 of these are true editorial votes“. The SEO Company charge £999 per linkbait article.

600 links costing £999 = £1.665 per link

These links are one-way links, which are more important to SEO. The 30-40 editorial votes are likely to drive far higher quality traffic than link requests shotgunned out to webmasters, who paste them anonymously into link pages. Do however, bear in mind that this is a success story, so your actual link volumes may be less.

Paid links

In it bid to prevent manipulation of the organic search results, Google announced in 2007 that:

“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.”

As such the buying of links that pass PageRank is not recommended. There are even tools for reporting paid links and Matt Cutts (Software engineer at Google) posts some great information on his blog about how and why paid links should be reported.

Valuation of paid links

Even though paid links are frowned upon, they still happen. There’s only so much an automated system can find (assisted by the anti-spam team at Google, and those reports submitted via Webmaster Tools), so if you’re careful where and how you buy, the is some (albeit risky) value to buying links.

So how much is a paid link worth? There are a handful of Link Valuation tools around, which take into consideration factors such as number of Backlinks, Alexa traffic rank, age of the website, etc:

Although the valuations can differ massively, they do give a good relative idea if you have a yard stick to compare against.

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