Certainty or Uncertainty of SEO / Link Building

[Sotkra]

Hey there

I'm new to both SEO and Seomoz. I have this personal site I've been working on SEO wise (slowly since I started learning from 0) and I have reached a point where the only missing thing for me to do is build links. However, the competitors for my site have thousands of links.

From all I've read on the web regarding SEO&LinkBuilding, including articles in this site...the old method of spamming links wherever/whenever possible is now being penalized while the practice of manual/hand-built links of higher quality and lesser quantity is rewarded.

So I went ahead and approached several linkbuilding companies and one thing that struck me was the level of uncertainty regarding the chances of getting a site to get to the first page.

I understand there's factors you cannot predict or control, such as what your competitors are doing on the SEO front...but ultimately, I'm curious as to how do you effectively gauge the possibility of getting to the top page of any keyword combination?

Especially when dealing with clients... since apparently whoever 'guarantees' you anything is a fraud or uses blackhat techniques...how do you pitch the 'uncertainty' to the client?

Likewise...how do you know if you can make it to the top page or viceversa?

Cheers

[Thommas]

This is very true. Money makes the Web go round.

[Thommas]

Yes, you can replicate your competitor's links provided you have sufficient resources and skills. There is no magic, well maybe a little bit.

[jonathanwashburn]

German,

The site explorer tool here on SEOMoz provides the data necessary to deconstruct the quality, type and amount of links going to your competitors pages. Within a reasonable degree of error you should be able to predict where your site will rank after you generate those links.

There are lots of variables like age of incoming links and on page seo, but if you do your research - it's not magic, it's just math.

[EGOL]

I can't guarantee first page rankings for my own sites.  So, how can I guarantee anything to you?

[firstconversion]

All a matter of risk, weighed against resources. If you had sufficient resources, I could get you to #1 with 99.99% certainty. However very few businesses have the level of resource to create that level of certainty

Instead people will try do what they can with only a few thousands $$ a month and hope they get to the top one day

Most linkbuidling companies pitch based on competitive research for the number of links they think they will need to build + their track record of building those links and hitting those positions for other clients

S

[upick-162391]

I personally never give a guarantee of 1st page rank or #1 rank, and most people would tell you if you're paying for SEO and someone guarantees you 1st page rank or #1 rank they are lying.

The is no 'surefire' way of getting top ranks, well not for me anyways, I battle it out with my top competitors everyday for the top position and some days I win and some days I lose.  The only way of dealing with clients in terms of ranking positions is your past work. I usually show my clients analytic reports of how my work has played a major contribution to sales, traffic and conversations. I also prove to them that what I'm doing is increasing their sales figures on the organic level.

Don't play the card where you say I'm going to get all your top keywords to the top, WRONG, because at the end of the day you don't need to rank #1 for the biggest keywords in your industry, you need to rank #1 for 1000s of the small 'low hanging fruit' keywords with 10%-50% conversation rates. That's the real skill and results that my clients want to see.