Affordable SEO Services, Link Building and Fairy Tales

I was doing some keyword research today for my blog and I looked up affordable SEO services in Google. First of all I was shocked to see a very small number of results, 366,000 for broad search and only 131,000 for phrase match search. Now that is a solid number and not hard to rank in top ten, and the searches are great. According to Google Adwords Keyword Tool number of searches per month for affordable SEO services is 14,800, which is a great number of searches. But that is just the beginning of my keyword research, the next thing I did was of course checking the competition, and that is where I got mad. On the fist page of Google for that keyword, half of the websites offer their link building services as their affordable SEO solution!

I went to read on each of these websites, and except a few websites all of the others basically come down to link building. Now this is something I failed to mention in my SEO Myths hub and on my blog, but from what I saw today and from what I heard from other bloggers there are plenty of so called expert SEO companies that basically offer only link building services as SEO.

I need to stress out that link building is a part of the SEO process and a good SEO campaign relies on link building, but it’s just part of search engine optimization. If link building was all it takes to rank high then why is a site with 32 backlinks in front of a site with 50,000 backlinks? Two simple reasons, first of all there is much more to search engine optimization than just link building, second, you have to be careful where your links come from.

I already covered most of the aspects of SEO so I won’t repeat myself here, as this is not the point. But I will say a few things about the importance of link building and where your links come from. You all probably know that the number of links and the quality of those links has a great influence on your page rank. But, you can find a website with 1,000 backlinks that has a PR3 and you can find a website with 5,000 backlinks with PR1. So what is the catch, the other website has 5 times more backlinks. Two major factors influence this; the first one is the quality of the link. If that link comes from a related website then the link has much more value.

Let’s say you have a blog about relationships, you won’t get much link juice from a blog about car parts, but if you get a link from a marriage counselor blog, then the link will count much more. The second major factor is the authority and page rank of the website where your link is coming from. The authority is considered by the PR, age of the domain and the quality of the content, not to mention the number of visitors and the ranking the website has. But a very important part is where the link is coming from on that website, although you will get some points for having a link from an authoritative website, you will get much more if you get a link from a high PR page. Most of the times people say that they have a link from a PR& website for example, while the domain has a PR7, The page they are getting the link probably has a PR0, there is a big difference in those.

So back to the topic, affordable SEO services boil down to link building, according to many! When I look at the search results and those websites I know why there is so much confusion about what SEO is and why everyone thinks that it all comes down to link building. There are thousands and thousands of websites offering SEO services while in fact all they do is build links, and I must warn you, they are not so good about it. In most cases you will be lucky if you don’t get slapped by Google as these companies build massive amounts of links too fast and that get’s noticed, and not in a good way. Also most of those links come from worthless blog comments, profiles and thousands of directories.

So to sum it up, I’m still mad, I still can’t fathom why people go for the first thing they see instead of thinking a minute or two is it really worth it to give their money just like that? When you go to a website to hire someone to do SEO for your website, be sure to ask for their reference and their methods. If all they provide is link building, no matter how affordable it may seem, find someone else. Affordable SEO services depend only on one thing, and that is not the price, but the return of the investment you made for those services, and link building will not get you that investment back.