SEO firms and linking strategies

Is linking often included in the services for site optimization?

[elf2588]

I'm a small site owner (my site is about snowboarding) and I've been doing lots of research on how to optimize the site since I'm in a pretty niche industry and I think I could do OK. However, this is my "side" business and I work during the day, so not a lot of time to do the SEO research or implementation myself... as such, I've been looking at some SEO firms' services and pricing structures. I'm seeing most of them offer link building as an additional fee to their regular SEO fees.

Just curious, is this typical, or do some SEO's include linking in their overall optimization services? I know that linking is really important to site rankings, so it seems like it should just be included in the SEO packages. Anybody have 2 or 5 cents to weigh in here? :-) thanks!

[David Bruning]

Not sure if I'm the authority your looking for, but......

Depending on your mileage you can few decent links for hours of work.

This being the case, I would never consider including link building into a price. I'd offer a per hour fee for the work. Not too mention it can be hard to justify your time if you've hit a dry spell...naturally you would still want to get paid...

FWIW

[Ace1]

I have noticed that usually a lot of SEO companies adopt this kind of pricing strategy when the link building is being outsourced.

[Crush]

We do it for people on a per link basis. It is different per site. Someone may need 2000 links, someone else 200. There is no way you can price it into SEO without knowing teh competition.

[jaffstar]

And then we fall into the following questions

1. What type of links are they (one way vs. reciprocal).
2. What is the pagerank where the link is coming from?
3. Is it on topic or off topic?

The point I am trying to make is, a link is not just a link.

I do a competitive analysis, and then determine how many links are needed, and yes it’s an extra cost.

[submitx]

Now days if you do not create links you won't be able to get any rankings. Any good SEO company knows this. We inlclude link builidng as part of our SEO services. We set pricing depending on competitiveness of keywords. If we feel certain site would need many many more links to get some rankings then we take the price higher accordingly.

It amazes me that even some of our clients do not realize that most of the work we do is link building. In a few instances, we have had clients complain that we had not updated their optimized files in months and that they were paying monthly fees and we were not doing any work. We had to explain to them just how much work we do and how much if their rankings are based on links.

[nuevojefe]

You have to stress off-page optimization when proposing to them.