Link Popluatirty Matters.com... Opinons please.

I am playing the role of a white hat SEO. Since my boss is so impatient, he wants to be ranked #1 on google for our keyword within 6 months! So he's thinking about using this link-building service to get his page there. Does anyone know anything about them? Cant seem to find any hard evidence whether they are good or bad.

Link building services are fickle at best. Most will only obtain rubbish directory links just to get the $$$$. I cant seem to see the website, is it live?

First off, what is your keyword with the 6 month time frame? What is your budget?

If you think quality links and $5 go hand in hand, you're mistaken.

The links they provide would help for extremely low competitive terms at best. Perhaps local listings only.

When searching out an SEO, price shopping should not be an option. You need quality, not cheap.

Jsteele: our keyword is small business loans. No budget.

People who have replied within the past few hours: Thank you.

If you're talking about a national level, then it sounds like your chances of ranking in 6 months is equal to your budget. If you're talking about ranking locally, then you may have a chance.

As far as national listings are concerned, you'll need to convince your boss that this will not happen without some funds to spend, and even then, 6 months is an unlikely target. Stretch that out to a year, with a budget of at least $25,000 and you may be in luck. If you need some funds, maybe a small business loan is in order?

Seriously though, you're in a competitive niche. Without hiring the right kind of link builder and content developer, you're going to be wasting time and money on this. Don't hire just anyone that sends you a proposal. Think about it, would someone who could rank a site in a competitive industry really be lurking for new business on forums? It's a step up from email spam, but the quality is worth about the same.

If you wish to seek professional counsel on this, go to the members list and sort by reputation. Many of the ones you'll find at the top do not work for others, but would likely provide you with a good list of potentials.

Best of luck.

seomonkeymanocp is correct link developing is a strange service to begin with and it is unlikely anyone here has experience with that service since most here have their own services (if you have your own you probably don't invest in someone else services).

I would say that you can achieve the desirable results in 1-2 months but no with a zero to low budget... return is equal to your investment... you can do it for free if you have a year or two... and a few hundred bucks won't change much.

Looking at the avatars here... I feel like I'm at the zoo!

Agree you are very cheap always providing free advices but all are worthy, and I follow you guide and getting good salary from my company, I follow you on twitter also !

Haven't gotten back to twitter yet (since was blind from an eye infection) probably restart in February.

lol.. We are all animals in the world of business... Dog eat dog and all that... But Dragons are at the top of the food chain .....

...rump roast for tomorrow!

Nice background..... Is that for when you get done?

External Link Popularity is intended to be used for web directories. It uses the Voting API module to rank nodes that contain external links. Points are awarded when users follow the external link in the node. These points can be given a lifetime to limit the scope of the rankings: e.g. most popular today, weekly, etc. Each user's click is counted only once per voting period per node. The module also provides a block showing most popular nodes.

The implementation is done without redirection or altering the link markup, by using a background javascript call, so it is SEO friendly to the link recipient.

Thank you all for the wonderful responses. And what a lovely zoo it is.