Linking Campaigns for Customers

[dharrison]

Hi

I am doing some research in anticipation of my new specialised SEO service. I would love to hear from fellow SEO pros your views on linking campaigns. Do you do carry out link campaigns on behalf of customers or do you encourage them to do-it-themselves? How much time do you allocate per month on an average link campaign and do you budget per link?

Any thoughts/views/opinions will be gratefully received.

Best regards

[oneofthe3lions]

Argueably (or perhaps not) the most time consuming and today the most important of all the seo practices..Particularly for less established sites that arent getting 'natural links'..

However you budget things I would say at least 25% of your time would involve this type of 'marketing'.. and you have to build that into your equations as time is money.

[janeth]

If it was me here's what I would do.

I would submit the site to directories, send out articles, either you or your client post in forums (in his market), do press realeases and try and put something on the site that would make people want to link to it.

Directories have gotten big, I would add a directory to his site just for his market and ask people to give you a return link.

I would spend my time finding a way to get free links rather than trying to get people to do a link exchange with me.

I would also start off by going after the long tail keywords. This way your client can see traffic start coming in the first week or two.

[bobitza]

I would say that link exchange is something tricky when it comes to getting equal links. Usually you would want to set-up an even "trade" with the site you're exchanging links. Usually the links are on a directory/resources pages structure that have other links on it. That means that the PR of the page is split between the links on it ... and if the list is pretty long, parts of the links are not even parsed. Also, the page can have, let's say, 3 links when you initiated the link exchange in order to get to 100 links in 2 weeks ...

So, do you guys take in consideration these aspects when starting a link campaign? What software do you use to verify that reciprocal links aren't deleted after a few days.