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Hey Chad! Happy to chime in on this one a bit. This is my opinion, and it gets a little philosophical, because I feel it really depends how you want to run your business and your website. If it were me, I would highly recommend NOT hiring a company that is only doing link building (especially in these "package" type formats). Your internet marketing strategy and SEO strategy should be a more holistic process. That is, if you are focused on long term success, not just a potential short term boost in ranking/traffic. It is my philosophy (and the way I structure my consulting work) that link building happens last down the chain ofprioritization. And by that I mean; 1st have a business or website with a unique selling proposition know why this business or website exists create a website which is attractive, functional, indexable and clearly communicates your business purpose and unique selling proposition - optimize it for keywords based upon keyword research fill it with compelling, unique, helpful content - and have a plan for adding new content as often as possible have your intentionally chosen social profiles claimed, and at least setup, even if you don't post on them all of the time network online with others in your industry in social media, Q&A sites, forums, commenting on blogs (not for links but for networking) THEN you've got a solid foundation, and you can start pro-actively coming up with link building strategies - but this is after all of this other stuff is at least somewhat in place. Then the POWER of your link building in only enhanced by all this other great stuff you have going on. And its much less risky because you've built a solid foundation. If you have all that other stuff going for you, and you want to get an outside company to do build some links for you to enhance what you're already doing, I'd suggest checking out the SEOmoz recommended companies for link building list.  And if and when you do hire a company to help build some links for you, make sure its a company or person that understands SEO as a whole. Do they understand site architecture, and keyword research and analytics? Maybe not to the degree of specializing in every single one, but enough so that they understand how their link building services fit into your bigger picture. I think where some of the confusion comes from out there, is that these link building services can at times bring positive results, but they are usually higher risk and short term. If I was a business owner, I would invest in things that will always bring an ROI, like the other items listed above. Really hope that helps!! -Dan

Content! If you write well, to communicate to the site user, you will do well. You will also tend to naturally use crucial words/phrases which normally go with your main subject. (A page on a baseball game, for example, will naturally include team names, runs, pitchers, bats, balls, teams, stars, innings, etc.) Those will tend to serve as secondary keywords, which in turn makes the page appear on more searches.

Hi Ennovation - To directly answer your question, if you nofollow the link back, they will not receive any credit for your link. If they have a followed link to you, then you do receive credit. Simple as that. People doing link exchanges are usually quite wise to this, though, and when they find that you nofollowed the link to them, they will often remove the link that is pointing to your site. I also have to tell you that I don't recommend link exchanges. I suspect that pages that exist just for link exchanges, or sites offering them, are quite discounted in Google. Plus, it ends up looking quite spammy, even if the sites you are exchanging links with are in your niche. Since you are already thinking about building and keeping relationships with people, why not take it a step further beyond a link exchange, and instead do a guest post for them? If they want to do one for you as well, I think that's totally fine. Good luck.

Hi Ian, Open Site Explorer only crawls a percentage of the web and your DMOZ listing might be in a page that is too deep to be crawled and indexed by Linkscape. Also the OSE data is only updated every few weeks with the the next update due at the end of the month. If you run a Google Search for site:dmoz.org  "Nutrition Mission" You can see the listing page has been indexed by Google and the last page cache is showing as  9 Apr 2012 10:18:13 GMT, so Google has visited the page recently and discovered your link.

Thanks will take a look at this!

Here is a blog post and a presentation I did on building links into product pages. Hopefully there will be enough tips between these two and Rand's Whiteboard Friday post (Devin linked to below) to move you forward: SMX West 2012 Presentation: http://www.seoverflow.com/link-building/seoverflow-er-everett-sizemore-speaks-at-search-marketing-expo-smx/  SEOMoz Blog Post: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/building-deep-links-into-ecommerce-pages

Hi, We do have a blog, I just tried the link and it worked fine? The only link is from the about us menu. Is that ok?

Unlimited QUALITY content?   That makes me salivate. Be sure that each new piece of content is going to do at least one if these things:  get you out in the SERPs for new keywords, provide information that visitors are interested in, be a magnet for social attention and links. The cooking niche is enormous.  However, I personally would not give one page of QUALITY content those "smaller blogs, buying guides and social media accounts"  especially if they are "interlinked in a random way". I would put all of my energy into building a fortress instead of building a lot of hotdog stands out yonder.

Thanks for the replies! Sometimes its harder to create great content when you are an agency and don't have control of what  your clients are doing all the time.

Lots of people (philosophers) have an idea about how they think google "should" behave.  Then you have people who know what they are talking about and philosophers who are unwilling to believe that they are wrong. Finally, just because we see something happen doesn't mean we know what caused it.

The first website is not too bad, it seems to have many pages, I mean social links are not advisable but they can work depending on the style. I also had a quick look at the backlink profile seems they use related sites, articles in mass, blog comments, forum posts, I mean not the best but it seems to work! But for how long? The second website the content is lower, yet it seems to provide something the "a limited amount of" users want. Don't get me wrong I have had 1 site removed from the index for no reason at all deemed low quality so when I see junk like this it makes me angry, but I feel the first site does serve its place and Google search quality would probably let it slide, the second site however I do not know how long it will last it is just a matter of Search Quality finding the sites.

I think that post (if it's the one I remember) was talking about making a graph of the pr of pages that link to a website.  Ie How many links come from pages with pr0, pr1, pr2 etc etc. All the sentence is referring to is looking for a spike in the graph at the lower pr levels pr0, pr1, pr2 etc as a sign of perhaps low quality. There are various plugins available for the different browsers to see the pr of individual pages (eg I use Chrome and have SEO Site Tools installed).  But bare in mind that the TBPR is rounded number of the actual PR of a page from one moment in time and is only updated a few times a year.  True PR is a constantly updated value.

Sounds dangerous! Usually, these types of links may be found on high authority pages, but the placement is spammy, such as deep in the footer with 100 other links, or an out-of-context sidebar link. Do the pages have PageRank? I only ask because a page may display both PA and DA, but if it's been de-indexed by Google then it most likely will be stripped of PageRank. The other problem is relevance. The links may be of little value to you if they don't come from on-topic pages. In short, I would advise you stay away from this. But, to answer your question, you would need a ton of links to move your Domain Authority from 62 to 78. That's because both PA and DA are scaled algorithmically, meaning a ten point jump could be 100 times more difficult to achieve. At the upper ranges, the difference between scores becomes much more pronounced, so that it's much more difficult to rise from a 60 to 70, than it is to go from a 10 to a 20. Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

SE = Search engines they can see what you are up to

I checked out the first of your two links and found it very helpful. Lookk forward to the other one and reading them more thoroughly. I really appreciate your help.  Thank you.

Target keywords that people would search for and find their brand or that the brand already optimizes themselves for. For example, if you can't use "SEOmoz" you can target "SEO tools" or "SEO software" for your backlinking strategy instead.

Thanks Rambo I guess the difficult question to answer is whether Google will give more weight to something like a niche association website or a niche blog with higher authority. I'm guessing the blog would help more if their links are quality. A lot of associations don't attract that many links it seems (maybe an opportunity for SEOs to help out). Best, Charles