The first thing you need to do is learn a little about link building yourself before you go shopping. You don’t need to be a link building expert, but you need to understand how the process works to be an informed buyer. You can learn what you need to know right here on this site. You may want to read these posts if you are not already familiar with these topics:

• How to get Links to Your Website
  
• Seven Keys to SEO Link Building Success
  
• Why One Way Backlinks?

You should now have a pretty good understanding of the kinds of linking and the benefits of one way links to your site. Let’s start by listing some of the things you should avoid in link building services.

FFA Sites and Link Farms – These don’t work, at least not long term and participating in them can actually harm your website rankings. FFA is short for “free for all” and are sites with thousands and thousands of links with no real content. Link farms are similar and the search engines may penalize your rankings if you have a lot of links from these types of sites.

Comment Spam – Posting relevant comments on blogs is a valid link building tactic, but posting junk comments just to get links is useless. Unfortunately, there are  services out there that use comment spam as their primary strategy.

Reciprocal Links – There is noting wrong with recipricol links, but if you get nothing but recipricol (or two way links) you are not getting a lot of milage out of your links. Two way links help a little but you really need one way links to get good search engine rankings. Some link building services concentrate only in getting two way links and if those are used they should be only part of your
link strategy.

Buying Links – Google hates sites that sell links and sites that buy them. If you buy links, especially high page rank links you risk the wrath og Google.  Even beyond the risk of being punished by Google buying links is by nature a very short term tactic. When you buy links you are paying for them every month and as the bills add up as some point you are going to want to stop paying for them. When you stop paying you abruptly lose the links.

We have covered what to avoid when looking for link building services. In the next article we will take a looks at the positive aspects and what you really want to get out of this kind of service.

You also probably know that links to your pages are important to get good search engine rankings. That part of search engine optimization (SEO) is often called link building SEO. Having good keywords is just as important for link building SEO as it is for the content of your pages.

How do you get good keywords? It all starts in your head. Do a little brainstorming and come up with a “starter keyword” that is general and coveys what your site is (or will be) about. As an example let’s take the keyword lamps as our starter keyword for our link building SEO project.

If you read my newsletter you may already know that lamps is a great keyword, but it is very tough to rank for it because there is too much competition. We need some less generic keywords.

We are going to use same free tools to get a list of keywords to work with.

Visit the following link to get started:

WordTracker free keyword suggestion tool

Enter the word lamps in the keyword field and click the “hit me” button. You will get a list of related keywords and an estimated number of searches per day for those keywords. If you click on any of the listed keywords the tool does a new search with that keyword as the starting point.

If you were doing this keyword research for your link building SEO campaign you would want to copy and paste the data into a spreadsheet or text file so you can keep track of it.

I like the WordTracker tool because it is very fast and simple to use. You can also use the following tool to do the same thing and even get more data:

Google AdWords Keyword Tool

As you use the Google tool you will notice that the search volume numbers are monthly and typically much higher than the WordTracker estimates. Google’s numbers are from their own search data and are probably more accurate.

There is a lot of data you can get from the Google tool including some estimate of the amount of competition from the green bar graphic for each keyword. In another blog post I talked about a more accurate way to measure keyword competition.

There is one more free tool for your link building SEO keyword research I want to introduce:

MSN Commercial Intention Checker

It defaults to URL input but you will want to select the query mode and enter a potential keyword. It will give you either a commercial intention number or a non-commercial intent number. on their scale 1=100%. If your site is selling something this is a very important thing to know.

All of these free tools are great and they can really help you build your keyword list for link building SEO, but they have one drawback and that is that it takes an incredible amount of time to use them effectively. As we all know — time is money. The less time you need to spend on keyword research the more time you have to actually build sites and make money.

I have tried a lot of commercial keyword tools and there is only one that I use consistently. It does everything you need to pick winning keywords and it does it fast. You can generate suggested keywords, you can find commercial intent, and you can get a very accurate measure of competition and know exactly what you need to do to beat the competition.

That last point is very important. What it tells you is how many links the competitors have that use the keyword as the linking text. Once you know that you know that if you can get more keyword anchored links you can beat their search engine ranking.

This tool is called:

WebComp Analyst

It is worth every penny of it’s reasonable price because it can save you hundreds of hours of time and make you hundreds or even thousands of dollars with the information it provides.

If you are serious about link building SEO and making money online you will want this tool.