I have a travel agency website which aims to sell tour packages. It is a new domain and I published it just a few weeks ago. I do not want to hire a Seo expert because I want to become one in the future so I need to learn. I read thousands of ideas and articles about link building techniques after Penguin update but I am more confused than ever now. I submited my site into several high quality paid directories and bought several links but I bought them carefully, different IPs, checked PRs,OBLs, used different anchor texts and some of them are blog posts and others are blogrolls. I actually bought some 10-11 links but I am not sure it is a good idea anymore even if it is done carefully. For link exchange I have also read that not a good idea any longer besides no quality website is eager to exchange links with my new release PR0 website. I am trying to create good and unique contents but what should I do for link building? Thank you in advance for your recommendation!
buying links is not a good idea in my view as most of the sites want to you pay on a periodical basis where crappy sites sell lifetime links. also, you may pay for the links today but there is no guarantee how long they will be there. besides, there will be links from various different verticals so it will be suspicious to google. thats one of the indicator that google uses to identify paid links. for example, if a health site has links to designer handbag or discount auto parts site, that doesn;t make sense so google might get suspicious. no matter how careful you are, google is smarter than anyone else so they have ways to detect paid links. regarding links building methods: as long as you are using white hat methods, they still work. penguin hasn;t changed anything that is legitimate. only spammers and black hat users need to be warned and worried. you use typical link building methods like article writing/submission, bookmarking, publishing articles on web 2.0 pages, etc. pay attention to social media presence which is a good indicator now. try to increase your google plus circle and participate in facebook community. if you wanna be good at this, it will require lot of time and practice but you can do it. Rome wasn't built in a day and no SEO expert was born overnight. with practice and dedication, anyone can be an SEO expert over time.
okay. thank you very much. it is actually what I was afraid of to hear. My intention is not becoming an expert overnight and I was thinking that buying several links a month beside creating organic links by great content and using submissions etc. might help to get my ranking - lets say - 1 year in stead of 2-3 years. But it is just an idea of a beginner so I asked you to share your experiences. I checked the backlinks of my competitors and almost all of them has one edu link from the same website the homepage of which actually has nothing to do with the niche but the page in which the links are, is closely related but this not a forum or a blog where you are allowed to write something in order to drop your link. So I d thought that it would be a good idea to buy one edu link - not a students page - a real, high PR , edu link. And it is really expensive. In this case it is not going to help, and can even harm my rankings - which I do not have any for now