Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Steve, I really appreciate the perspective.  I'm going to consider moving the account.  You and Ryan have given me the perspective I needed.  Thank You.

Your points are well taken. I have spent a great deal of time researching this today and really appreciate the feedback.  I had a feeling this might be the case but I'm thankful to have the affirmation.

Hi Steve. Thanks for the time.  Here is a link to a pretty typical result...http://www.hanoverstables.com/. We were doing about 1500 per month and now we are around 2250 or so. We are in the storage business with 2 of our top 10 keywords in the top 3, another 5 holding stable at 14 (up from say page 3/4) and another 2 or 3 well outside the top 50.

Our conversions are only up 10-15% during the same period. We have done on-site optimization, we add 10 relevant articles per week across our targeted keywords.  We do not have a big directory presence and are not in yahoo, dmoz, or many niche directories.

We have over 120 links going on any given month.

No they do not.  They have encouraged me to review links in yahoo explorer.  I've noticed through yahoo site explorer that we have more low quality blog sites that give us a link with 15 or so relevant words around the link. The link is a desired keyword as the anchor text.  I've also noticed an emergence of sites that give only a link with the anchor text in the blog-roll.

Organic traffic has increased more than 50% since we engaged them 6 months ago so I feel it's working.

Thank You Ryan. I appreciate your time in answering my question.

I just joined SEOmoz and I have enjoyed all the information.

I currently outsource link building to an agency that charges $50 per link. For this, they handle the anchor text creation, the surrounding text and solicitation, acquisition and monitoring.  I know they send the actual work to their independent contractors.

How do you find those independent contractors so that I can build my own network of contractors and save the client money?