If you are going to get visitors to your website you are going to have to optimize for the search engines. In order to do that you will need to get links to your site, lots of them. This is an incredibly boring and tedious job so a lot of people choose to outsource it. The problem is that if you outsource it to the wrong person you will end up with a bunch of worthless links. You need to know how to choose a link building company if you are going to outsource the job.
The main thing that you are going to want to look at when you are choosing a link building company is how they are going to build the links. There is a right way and a wrong way to do it and if they do it the wrong way the links will not only be useless but they may actually hurt your site. Unfortunately the easy way to build links is also the wrong way which is what a lot of link building companies do. The main thing that you need to avoid is reciprocal links. It is very easy to go out and trade links with hundreds of other sites, these links are basically worthless.
You are going to need know what constitutes a good link before you start looking for a link building company. This will allow you to assess the kind of job that they have done. Also, make sure to look for the company on Facebook and Linkedin, and see if their employees have the right background. Degrees like Online Marketing Degrees or SEO backgrounds are very valuable!
You are also going to want to get a list of the other clients they have worked for. You will want to actually check the links coming in to their site and make sure that they are good quality links, which are the ones that will assist you in your SEO efforts. This can be done fairly easily since there are a number of free programs on the internet that will allow you to look at all in incoming links that a site has. If the site has good quality links coming from the right places, going to the right places with the proper anchor text the link building company probably know what they are doing. It also doesn’t hurt to do a search for the site just to see where it ranks; you should know what keywords they were targeting by the anchor text of the links.
You are also going to want to check the links coming in to their own site. Presumably they want to rank well for phrases related to link building. If they don’t have the right kinds of links coming into their site you are probably going to want to choose a different link building company. You will also want to do a search to see how their site ranks. After all the whole point of building links is to get their site to rank well. If they can’t do it then there is little reason to pay them to build links to your site.
