Optimizing your site or blog for search engine ranking isn’t that hard. There’s plenty of tutorials on how, but the thing that holds many sites back is their Google Pagerank. It’s kind of like a popularity contest, and the sites linking to yours with one way links (not to a site you link back to, Google can spot that and discounts it) determine how high your site ranks. Most people don’t have any idea how to get a high pagerank site to link to them, but there is an affordable solution.

Buying one way backlinks is the fastest way to get your own site up the ranking ladder, but you have to be careful not to be greedy. For example, one place that’s now out of business, Viper linking setup a network of 3,000 domains and for a price you could get thousands of backlinks form their network. The thing they screwed up was using the same anchor text and Google banned all their domains for spamming. Also, the customers they did get also got penalized or their domains banned for taking part it in.

The right way is to rent links from a quality site that’s as close to the topic of your own as possible, and as high a pagerank as you can afford. Also make sure the anchor text (the text part of the link) is different for each one you buy or rent. I prefer to rent backlinks because when you buy them for a flat price the links can be taken down without you knowing it, or the page can become overloaded with links if they sell to all comers, which makes yours less effective.

I use Authority Backlinks and like them a lot. They have several thousand sites to pick from, and carefully screen publishers so you won’t get stuck on a link farm page. Also, since they don’t own the thousands of domains, they’ve never run into any trouble with Google. You can also sell links and get a monthly payment if you have a site with good pagerank. For renting links, they vary from about $2 a month per link, and it goes up for high PR links.

Compared to Pay Per Clicks (where you bid on keyword and pay the amount when someone visits) it’s a great deal if you have content and simply want your site to come up more often for natural searches. You can have the best content in the world, but until Google regards your site as important by having other relevant sites linking to yours, it’s not going to get seen by many.

Optimizing a site for search engines and buying some quality backlinks are the two best bargains for getting natural search engine traffic. If you find yourself in need of an optimization for your site,  email me and I can give you a quote. I’ve been doing SEO for over 15 years now, and I just believe companies are too dependent on Pay Per Clicks these days.

A few months ago when the Google Slap happened, many businesses were effectively shut down when they got banned from Google Adwords due to low “customer experience” scores. Diversifying traffic is always a good thing, but I think a lot of people overlook natural ranking because it can seem like voodoo to the uninitiated. Also, if you do hire a place to do it, shop around because some of the agencies charge a fortune (the highest I ever saw was $800 per page, which is sheer madness). A good SEO expert will work with you, and not take a cookie cutter approach.