How to Hire Link Building Services

By Charles Moffat - August 2011.

#1. Look for SEO companies which have a good PageRank themselves. Check their main index page. Anything above a 3 indicates they know what they are doing. (ie. Ours is a PageRank of 4 as of August 2011.)

#2. Inquire about quality links. The better the PageRank and the more on topic the website is the more results you will get on a per link basis. You are looking to get multiple quality links within your budget.

#3. Remember that a single PageRank 3 website is worth approximately 5 times a PageRank 2 website in terms of quality. Each rank goes up by approximatel a factor of 5. Thus a link on a PageRank 5 website is worth approximately 125 links on PageRank 2 websites.

#4. Don't bother buying links unless you have a good quality website that is at least "above par". If people are going to your website and not staying very long its a sign that you need to improve your content. A good rule of thumb is to promote pages you know have gone viral in the past or are at least popular.

#5. If the company is offering you "hundreds of links for $299.99" then they're a bargain basement company and their links will be shoddy to say the least. The going rate for quality links is approximately $30 to $50 per link.

#6. A lot of SEO companies won't even look at you if your budget isn't at least $300. They're looking to snag the big fish and don't want to waste their time on small time clients. Come expecting to spend at least $200. (Note: The really big SEO companies will be asking a lot more, like $5,000 for a short term campaign.)

#7. Find out how many websites the companies you are looking at actually have in their network. Use "site:companywebsite.com" to see how many pages they have on their own server. (Less than 10 pages suggests they're amateurs.) Over 1,000 means they're a big company, but at least they know what they're doing.

#8. Do a Google search for their company name. If the only websites coming up is their own they can't be very big, but if 1,000+ is coming up then this suggests the company has been around awhile and is doing a good job of promoting themselves.

#9. State your budget and then ask how many quality links you could get for that budget. ie. A $300 budget should net you somewhere an average of 10 good quality links. Less than 5 and they are ripping you off, more than 20 and they are probably pretty shoddy links built in a hurry. (Or worse, they're using Black Hat SEO and could actually damage your website's ranking.)

#10. Ask about past clients. If they don't have any past clients (or refuse to talk about them) then I smell a rat. There are a number of bad companies out there which are conning people into signing up for SEO services and then never actually delivering (or falsifying hits using a reloading bot).