Hi guys, I was recently asked a very good question:
“I am THE marketer for my company and wear too many hats. I can’t “do” SEO by myself. Any suggestions on a wallet friendly company that can help with our SEO needs?”
Since my reply was in such greater detail, I decided to share it on my journal.
Whatever it is, examine the links that you are getting yourself. It’s almost liked a “I can’t trust anyone, anywhere, no matter what”. Some links may hurt you when link building. A lot of services that offer SEO claim you are in a high ranked directory when it’s actually a auctioned domain with an average PR on it that they’ve installed a ‘Directory Template’ on.
You must always follow the steps, and examine one by one – and that process, costs money. So wallet friendly, I’d have to say you could do a nice link building for a company for approximately $5000 (without labor).
Look closer.
Take your time, spread approximately 200 – 300 directories which are good value, make sure they are indexed and get page rank, make sure you find yourself the exact niche within the directory – don’t be so quick to submit. Remember that if the directory itself, within the niche has pages (1,3,4,5,6,7) go all the way to page#7 which is most likely where you’ll be listed when approved and make sure that page#7 is getting a PageRank, and who else is listed there with you.
In regards to your question Alexander I would like to write this publicly.
Let’s take this domain for example
Http://www.skyalliance.net/ – looks like a normal directory right?
Let’s use the ‘WayBackMachine’ and see what this site looked like in 2003.
Http://web.archive.org/web/20021114152532/http://www.skyalliance.net/
You see what I mean? This is in some Asian language, nothing related to a directory. Which means the owners of this domain purchased it because it had a nice PR and it was auctioned at the time.
In 2004: http://web.archive.org/web/20030210053650/http://www.skyalliance.net/
In 2005: http://web.archive.org/web/20040210060512/http://www.skyalliance.net/
In 2008: http://web.archive.org/web/20050109041248/http://www.skyalliance.net/
In 2010: http://www.skyalliance.net/
Other things you should take a look into when doing link building (if you do it yourself, and trying to search the directories by yourself) I would recommend to use a nice FireFox tool called ‘Flagship’ which declares where the site is hosted, and it’s IP.
Remember that if the site is hosted in Germany, and it is a .com – that might be a bad link for you.
If it’s hosted in Germany, and it’s a .de – that might be a good sign, and will help you rank in Google.de, but not in the .com engine.
If the site is hosted in USA, and it’s a .com – that will help you rank in the .com engines (or USA engines) but then the next directory you choose – make sure it is not hosted at the same place, with the same exact IP – that would not count as two different links.
Be VERY careful using SEO companies that charge under $500 for link building of 30-50 links. This amount does not exist, I saw a company offering $80 for 1000 directory, you will end up hurting yourself, and working double time because you will either get penalized, or have to manually go into these directories and remove the links yourself. And trust me when I say you will be hurt being listed in sites like that.
TIPS:
When a company offers SEO services for directory listing always ask for their excel sheet to see their plan, Examine the links, make sure they are not hosted same place, they are all USA, or European hosts, then carefully choose which ones you want and where you want to be listed. Send it back to them and tell them these are the links you are interested and how much they will charge you for them.
This narrows down their job, and helps you get efficient links, and powerful link building.
NOTE:
There are MANY more aspects when doing link building like making sure that Alexa, Compete and mozRank and PageRank and similar within values, If a website is pagerank #1 and mozrank is 5.8 – something must be wrong (either mozrank did not update it yet) but that page might have gone through penalization.
If the page does not get a PR, and receives Alexa, Compete and Moz – that means it might be penalized. Take the URL, and search it in Google like this:
Example #1: site: http://www.url.com/
example #2: site: http://www.url.com/subpage
See if the actual domain (not sub pages) comes up in search. (Or the sub page that is not getting a page rank).
Let’s do some SEO!
For more information about this thread please go to http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?vi…%2Egmp_2976409
Feel free to find me on LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/danielhaim
Read about my progression in Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/feeds/businesswire/2010/08/03/businesswire143344209.html
