You can think of links as votes. The more links you have pointing to your site, using anchor text relevant to your product or service, the more 'popular' and 'useful' you seem to the search engines. After all, someone links to your site because they like it, they found something useful, or because they're giving you a vote of confidence. Or because, let's face it, your link building services negotiated a link from them.

Buying a link is a no-no in the world of Google and SEO. But requesting a link to your interesting or useful content, or negotiating a link in exchange for writing an article or blog post, well, that's a pretty gray area. Any quality link building service is going to be very careful how they go about building links to your site. If Google catches you in a link buy, they could very easily penalize your rankings. However, considering people are getting more and more stingy with their links, it can be tough to put great content out there and simply wait...and wait...and wait for links.

For one, you may have the best content in the world, but if it doesn't get spread around or noted by a more popular site or blog, people could miss out on it entirely. That is one part of what a good link building service can do for your site - draw attention to great content that will naturally lead to links. Another tactic of link building is to offer free content to other sites in return for a link back to your own. That may mean writing a whitepaper, a guest blog post, article or other type of content piece.

There are plenty of link building services that will buy links as well. And you know what? As long as you fly under Google's radar, I say to each his own. But when you're spending a lot of money on a link building service, you may as well reassure yourself that your site won't run into any issues due to questionable tactics. It's a very easy thing to simply ask a company what their link building policies and practices entail before you contract with them. And in the end, it can save you a lot of time and money in penalized rnakings.

The bottom line is: in order to rank well in the search engines you need to build links to your site. And not just any links, but high quality, anchor-texted links from authority sites (and maybe some regular links from articles, your social networking profiles, blog commenting, etc. - every little bit helps). But if you know next to nothing about SEO, you'll have no idea how to go about getting these links. That's why in the long run, most companies elect to spend their money on professional link building services, rather than waste time risk money and rankings by doing it themselves.


About the Author
Ashley Lichty is a copywriter, PPC specialist and all around SEO devotee. She specializes in writing web copy, managing ongoing PPC campaigns and on-site optimization of websites. She works for internet marketing company ProspectMX, who provides SEO, PPC and link building services to clients nationwide. In her spare time she loves reading, writing and trying to re-learn the violin.

Article Source: EzineArticles.com