The industry i work in is a bit old fashioned and i find it hard to get links from quality well ranked and relevant sites as there is not many around. For a Small business with a growing site £500 per link is just insane!
I understand the value of quality links but finding a relevant site above PR3 (I realize PR is not the be all and end all these days) is very uncommon in our industry. Our competitors have massively more links than us but in my opinion there links are a tad spammy. If my link profile looked like my biggest competitors i would be disavowing them asap.
I feel a quality link is,
- From a site that relevant to the topic of your site/page.
- From a high ranking site.
- In a prominent position as near the top of the page as possible.
- Surrounded by quality content about the page you are linking to.
- Preferably as close to the index page as possible, not 8 clicks down.
- The anchor text should vary from your other existing links.
- The page should not have a high number of external links on it.
- the page title should be relevant to your page and not be a links, forum or directory page.
- Preferably not on the same C block as other links to your site.
- The link should be likely to drive direct traffic as well as produce an SEO gain.
I'm sure i missed some things as I'm a site owner not an SEO specialist.
I was not judging "Good link builders" more the companies who claim to get you to the top of google in a month guys. Unfortunately I'm yet to find a good link builder. I keep finding the conmen and black hat guys. I think the good guys must cost too much for most small to medium businesses. As a retailer with an ecommerce site the current google methods seem to be geared to kick small businesses to the kerb. Ebay and amazon and now google shopping are wiping out businesses that are already hurting due to the economy.
I agree with goggles lust for quality sites i just feel it is sending big multinational sites so far ahead that it is almost impossible to get any momentum if you are a smaller business.
The thing i don't understand is why google seems to want so much content on ecommerce sites. Surely if real world shops are anything to go by shop layout, cleanliness, good displays, stock volume, price and service are what matter not how many leaflets and books you have on the products. in googles eyes you don't need to have the product and you can be double the price so long as you have a lot of info on the product none of that matters it just seems odd to me as a retailer that they don't differentiate sites by type so each can be optimized for the particular purpose.
That being said its just the way of the world.
Rant over!
