Recently, one of our colleagues received an email from an offshore company promoting link building services. Here is an excerpt from the email (SPAM):

“We are based in India. Would you be interested in outsourcing Link Building Services to us? We will be happy to deliver one way thematic links for any theme and numbers. We have delivered over 40,000 links to various retail and agency clients spread over different verticals.

OUR USP:

• Links from Unique IPs
• Regular Caching sites
• Less Outbound Links

We have our quality department checking each and every link as per the quality parameters.

We would pick the exact anchor text and will be happy to provide a choice of using as many anchors as you want. Besides all our links pass thorough the quality parameters set for link building ensuring only high quality link building for a website.
Do let me know if you are interested and we would be happy to discuss this further.”

First off, I have no problem with hiring offshore talent – there are some great talents around the globe, but this may lead one to believe that effective link building may be as simple as matching anchor text to target keywords and loading them in “different verticals”.

Many link building firms will build links and do it in the thousands for cheap. However, all links are not equal. Here is a good article to learn more about effective link building that discusses a number of specific techniques that are useful:

http://www.seobook.com/archives/001792.shtml

Note the various strategies for building quality backlinks. But also notice that the techniques are typically designed to get interesting or attention getting content out to the public. This is important because some offshore companies offering “quantities” of links are selling links that are not very useful and thus will either have little positive impact on your SERP’s (search engine ranking positions) and possible get a website into Google’s infamous supplemental index (blacklisted).

Like any other service, you can go cheap or hire good talent. Link building is no different with the one exception that it’s much harder to discern good link building from bad – at first glance. But, if you delve into the philosophy (to be defined more clearly later in this post) of Google, you will discover that Google appreciates backlinks that are used – aka, that drive traffic.

Here is a three step example of an effective backlink that may attract many more backlinks:

Step 1:

I just wrote an article about Google Maps and the new product that Google is launching (breaking news – quite valuable). Here is the post:

http://blog.befoundmarketing.com/google-maps-now-including-paid-listings-as-organic-listing-diminish/

Now, it is important to make this article useful and gather links and traffic to it to also make it valuable in Google’s eyes. So, here is one technique.

Step 2:

Promote it in social media engines like Digg for example. I just took the article above and put it in Digg as follows:

http://digg.com/d31871u

Now, it is found in Digg’s engine and there is a nice backlink (high page rank) that is likely to be used and shared because it is interesting news about Google’s new local map product that was released in 2 test markets.

Step 3:

Compound the social media link effect by bookmarking and tweeting.

In Twitter, I just used one of my ID’s to Tweet my Digg submission. Twitter, is the fastest way to drive traffic with social media and really add to the validation of my social media posts and bookmarks.

That is one technique. Note the Digg link above. If you go back to it, you will note that it has a counter of “views” at the top of the page in a gray boxed area on the left. I did this technique while I was writing an email. It took 10 minutes. As of this moment, there have been 18 views of this Digg post that I submitted only 10 minutes ago. By the time you check the number of views, it will be higher.

What does that mean? It means that my article was promoted properly with links that are USEFUL to the community and the content was good enough to grab traffic. Google sees the traffic and the usefulness. In return, I have a good reason for people to link to my interesting blog post (helps me get quality backlinks for free). I can link to my blog post from all the social media and bookmarking sites and expose this piece to others and get immediate traffic to my website within minutes. Of course, I did have to write the blog post at some point.

This is why 100 links can help you far more than 10,000 links. In fact, 10,000 links can destroy a web site.

All the reasons above are reasons for the following:

1. We employ professional writers who know how to write optimized content that captures an audience while loading the targeted keyword densities.

2. We employ professional article and directory submission professionals that follow specific marching orders

3. We employ social media techniques.

4. We research links, link building strategies, and social media about 25% of every week.

I’ve spent a lot of futile time and money chasing down link building methods in mass. Needless to say, if you are true to the philosophy of, “add value and promote effectively“, then you may build many links that are highly valuable that also generate traffic. Traffic being the most commonly ignored factor in gaining SERP’s that may likely be one of the most critical.