Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I have a predicament that I'm sure many of you SEO specialists have experienced in the past.
As a freelance SEO consultant I feel that it is important that I offer ethical 'link management' services to my clients. By ethical I mean no FFA, link farms etc. The problem I'm having is that I basically don't have time to build links to all my client sites on a regular basis (which is obviously required!).
I've looked at the following options;
Outsourcing the link building work - its difficult to establish a true element of trust with a contractor and the costs I have been quoted do not prove cost effective for my clients.
Link Programmes (such as links Exchanged and link market et..) - These only provide reciprocal links (non-reciprocals are better!) and the sites which link to you often have little relevance to your on-site topic. You also may find that tere are often more than 50 links on the linking pages.
I'm basically looking for the way to offer my clients an effective, ehthical and affordable link building service (many of my clients have limited budgets).
Is there anyone out there who has experienced and overcome this problem? What was the solution? Or can anyone suggest any additional effective automed link management programmes / software?
Many thanks for reading this, hope someone can shed some light!
My policy is if the link partner is a blatant commercial concern then they need a PR4 or greater on the page on their site where my link is found. If they are much less so of a commercial concern (don't sell stuff on the web and no sold advertising) then I'll create a link regardless of PR.
My point here is: This professional SEO/Link Developer is contacting me on behalf of non-commercial sites. To me this detracts from my philosophy of trying to help the little guy out because evidently the little guys in this field can afford to pay a Link Developer.
I'm about a fraction of an inch from just terminating my reciprocal link agreements with everyone (my reciprocals constitute just a portion of the total number of sites that link to me). When I look at my "links page" it is obvious to me that it is worthless (to visitors) and just SEO. I can't believe than anyone even once looked at it looking for valuable links.
This whole reciprocal links thing is out of hand. It's all artificial and not the natural creation of very on topic links to other content rich websites. Linking is great and what the web is all about but adding the word "reciprocal" to the word "link" implies that an agreement was made (tit for tat) and this degrades the idea of intersite linking (IMHO).
I'm basically looking for the way to offer my clients an effective, ethical and affordable link building service...
That's a huge issue in terms of SEO, and one you have to solve to offer value to your clients. This involves
effective, ethical and affordable
Some would say these three words shouldn't be in the same sentence. Link building, as a service, is inherently inethical when you really look at it isn't it? Let's face it, you want the links in the hope that it improves rankings.
The only ethical stance that I see for link building is to create "hooks" - uniques reasons why people would want to link to you of their own free will. Hooks that would send users first, spiders second.
People link to the BBC because they link to a specific story. People link to a weather site because they provide a live updateable weather feed.
Hooks. Build really good hooks. That's the way it was meant to be.
Or - submit to that fact that link building as a service is either expensive or unethical if you want it to be effective. Infact, I have seen plenty of schemes that are expensive AND unethical.
In summary, the question is 'how to you offer this service in an affordable, less time consuming manner without compromising the quality of links'.
I'm now thinking of using an established link managment package that allows you to upload a directory on your site - such as linkautomate.
Cheers guys! Lee
As not all clients would need the full Monty, I'd build up a list of free/low cost directory links to offer as either an included service, or a cheapish "starter pack".
