Backlinks

If you own a business you have a website  —or you should have… Ten years ago!

If you have a website, you know —or have learned that the very first thing you need to get in order to be successful is traffic coming to your website. You also know (or should know) that getting traffic over the long term means getting top ranking in the search engines for search terms that are related to your business.

Sure, you can get paid traffic in the short haul by using Adwords and other Pay Per Click (PPC) services. But PPC advertising has become ridiculously expensive over the past few years – so expensive that most website owners just can’t afford to compete with big companies in this battle of the checkbooks. Moreover, PPC traffic only comes to you as long as you pay for it. If you stop paying, you no longer receive traffic. Harsh capitalism.

Generating essentially FREE traffic from top search engine rankings is different. Once you get top positioning prospective customers can find you very easily. Simply put, organic traffic from top search engine positioning is free traffic you will get day in and day out, without having to pay anything for each visitor.

So how do you get top search engine rankings for the search terms of your choosing? There are several important factors like good keyword research and having great content on your website. Other SEO engineering such as your calculated selection of domain names, your domain’s age, your pre-paid domain registration, your meta-Title, meta-Description, and meta-Keywords associated with each and every page of your website. But of all the important factors, by far the most important and most difficult and expensive is having lots of backlinks to your website(s). The more links you have the better. And the more honest, legitimate and relevant the links are, the better as well.

Getting Backlinks – The Business-Owner’s Dilemma

Getting relevant backlinks is a ridiculously LARGE chore. How do most business owners or their hired webmasters do it? They try any of these methods:

  • Send an email to other websites and ask to exchange links
  • Submit their website URL to online directories and referral sites
  • Participate in online forums and make meaningful comments on blogs
  • Write countless, relevant articles for e-zines
  • Buy links from a link broker or SEO firm
  • Hire individual link builders on forums to do tedious linkbuilding for you

The problem is that these methods either

  • No longer work
  • Take many hours of drudgery every day
  • Cost a fortune and then your first born
  • All of the above

Most webmasters know that reciprocal links (“I’ll link to you if you link to me”) don’t help very much these days. Besides, who has the energy and hours to spend virtually every day sending unsolicited emails to other webmasters on the off chance that 1 out of 50 of them will actually even answer your email?

Online directories and referral sites may (or may not) publish your link. Even if they do, it will be buried on some irrelevant page buried many levels deep in their directory and isn’t even indexed in the search engines. Many will want $99 per year to list you – FOR ONE LOUSY LINK!

Forums and blog owners are getting more and more sophisticated and they can smell anyone with a marketing agenda from a mile away. Writing articles for ezines is always a good idea, but how many articles do you think you need to write in order to get the number of links you need? To get a large number of links from webpages that the search engines will not see as duplicate content, you’ll need to write lots and lots of articles. Ever try to write a letter 20 different ways with the same words?  Tedious! This is still a good way to market your website, don’t get me wrong, but the amount of time you’d need to spend to get a large number of quality links is enormous.

And of course, you can purchase links, or purchase the services of a person or organization that can get these links for you, but the cost can get very large very quickly. Want to buy some quality links?  Do the math! We want you to have 100 to 300 backlinks in a competitive market such as Southern California. Most services charge $10, $100 or even more per link! No matter what link building service you investigate, the cost of buying links adds up to big money really fast.  Most folks who buy links at $10 – $100 per link then have a monthly maintenance fee on top: on average, $300 per month. Oh, and as we said, miss a payment and the house-of-cards (links) come crashing down with a huge startup cost facing you as you re-start from scratch.

So why are you telling me all of this?  Can you help?

Yup…

We have one person, full-time, building, watching and maintaining our clients backlinks. For a small business (less than 50 employees and $5 Million in sales / services) we will average 5 links per week for the first year getting the links to the now-magic 300+ for that size of business.

This is a good, natural growth trend and remember, the search engines will expect a natural growth in links. Five per week, on average, will work out quite well.  If 300 links were to magically appear in one week or one month out of nothing, that would be “suspicious” to the AI software algorithms. Not to mention an army of staff it would require you to hire to pull off such a feat.  Such rapid link manipulation would likely get the website listed as a spam/ad site, or worse “de-listed!”