How do SEO companies do it ?

A top SEO company has access to properties on the web that provide great traffic or pagerank. The quality of what they provide is much higher and also a company secret in many cases. It is built on developing relationships over many years. The top SEO companies rarely delve into cheap stuff (but they do on occasion).

Yeah, they typically have their own network of High-PR sites which are super effective. Then they just do some other types of link building such as article marketing, social media, commenting, etc. to fill out the link profile but those High-PR networks they have are the most effective part of their strategy.

Hey Jetsetter883
It is a combination of two things. Outsourcing & Software.
They use software to do the majority of the grunt work for specific tasks & outsource workers for any of the manual tasks that need to be completed.

Others SEO companies will act as a reseller and will outsource the whole job to another SEO company. In this instance they simply go out and find the work charge the client top dollar then outsource the work to another company for less and pocket the difference. This is referred to as arbitrage.

I outsource most of my SEO work to companies/freelancers in India and Philippines. They are very reasonable ($200 a month for 4 keywords) and do an awesome job.
As far as I am concerned, they dont use even automated softwares. These seo companies have tried and tested methods besides, link builders who make good quality backlinks.
I usually see the backlinks on high pr websites and there are usually very less outbound links from those websites.
Even I get curious like you sometimes.

very interesting insights guys. but are most of the outsourced people in india, etc not just trained how to spam? sorry if that sounds silly, but my basis for comparison is the tremendous amount of gigs i see on fiverr etc originating from india for 10k PR3+ backlinks etc. also, many spam comments i see are written in broken english. how could you tell if you are just hiring another spammer? are there really armies of link building geniuses in the far east just waiting to complete the work for bottom dollar ?

I am also working such a company.We do nothing special rather than quality work each day.

SEO on Google has changed. This happened when Panda was introduced by Google last year. Google now bases a lot on the popularity and security of your site. So it is really hard to satisfy all of the search engines and what is required.

I still believe in SEO but I also aim to please Google as well.

I can tell you because I know.

They use link building services, just like the rest of us.

As well as that, they're typically constantly buying sites to build networks of their own, as already mentioned above.

seo is the very tedious work.

We too are a SEO company in-fact a reputed and known in the UK and that because of our work. What requires in a perfect SEO company is professionals who must be skilled and are always ready and eager to learn and develop too new strategies as marketing is an ever going and changing process which requires timely development. A SEO firm must be update with the algorithm and other updates of search engines to know as how and when to apply and what in order to rank the website. A good SEO company prefers on building quality and content based link building to rank website because apart from that nothing will and it has been proven as many websites which were ruling Google has dropped and many vanished completely. If a SEO company suggests you about content improvement and build links through articles, blog , their link wheel , forum commenting then that will result definitely though time could be a considerable factor.

Indigenious.. tried sending you a PM but my post count isn't high enough. Could you send me some insight on these link builders from overseas..? Thanks

Wow some REALLY bad answers in this thread.

No Professional SEO sompanies do NOT use the same services you see advertised here we develop our own resources and contacts. The Op is mistaken if he thinks that Pro SEO companies start from scratch with each client. You don't do that . You build resources, contact and link opportunities and you mine them for different clients. We can get links from sites that the average Imer cannot get because we develop relationships and network. No software tool out there can open a good relationship with a blogger who doesn't allow guest posting or have followed comments. NO software out there can you click some buttons and have a high PR network of domains that you control.

Is it harder in the beginning ? Yes. Is it hard for every client? no. Once you have the relationships you can go back to your network list from time to time. IM SEO frankly concentrates on cheap quantity links. this is NOT how a professional SEO company operates but the problem with that is that almost all backlinking companies eventually call themselves professional SEOs. However they are two different worlds. Theres no way my client companies want me to do anything at all that would associate their brand name with link spamming and in real business serps the SEOs that work them will not hesitate for a second to report link spamming or obviously bought links (which kills things like BMR etc)

TO illustrate the huge obvious difference many here would cry bloody murder if they paid for links individually ($30-$200 each) but as most know BUYING links individually from certain sites is common practice in SEO. Its nothing to drop a few hundred dollars to webmasters to get really good PR3,4,5 links in niches that relate.

You can kid yourself that the pro companies are doing the same things Imers are doing but its just a fantasy. It should be obvious that when a SEO company charges a few thousand a month they can leverage much better assets and they don't have to write a lot of content or place links themselves. In many cases the webmaster of the high profile site giving the link is comparable to the outsourcer just on a one to one basis.

To be honest the only time a Pro seo would touch some of the link strategies used by Imers is for ip diversity. I'll use some article links, some directories, press releases and maybe some low OBL blog comments etc sure but to rely on those (won't even bother with forum links) as my main driver for ranking client sites? NO WAY. I use my own privately developed resources and contacts for that. Use BMR for ranking client? Thats amatuer stuff. If My clients could rank using that alone why would they need me?

Software: senuke x, xrumer, scrapebox....to name a few.

Agree with Mike here, they do things quite a bit differently to most IMers out there, using self managed networks, relations with other high profile sites etc etc.

Another thing I notice is they will hit certain niches at the same time. For example they will go after pension companies but they will have a list of contacts, a network of high pr sites with content and will then attempt to get X number of companies in this niche and targetting different keyword phrases.

One thing you can do to get more of an idea is search seo companies and look at their testimonials, check backlinks on their sites and you will have more of an idea of what they are doing.

One big difference is time, typically IMers want it done ASAP whereas reputable seo companies will take their time as they cannot afford the risk of getting a company they work for getting slapped, plus they normally charge a monthly fee so will be quoting 6 months on something you and I may want to rank in a month or two, but run the higher risk of a penalty.

Well I can tell you I have worked for a big agency here in the UK and they just bought most of there links, they would buy lots of links from high quality sites and the rest was mostly outsourced.

OP here. Thanks to everyone for all of their responses.

@Mike Anthony:
You speak of forming relationships and creating networks of sites to obtain linking opportunities and such for customers. Around how many sites are you talking about? In the hundreds? In the thousands? Funny, I just started working with an e-commerce company who needed an SEO guy and I feel like such an amateur. But.. they used an SEO company to try and boost rankings and the 'backlinks' I saw in the reports were in the hundreds and all from spammy crap sites.. presumably their own network. None of them were indexed. So I'm just curious if you can elaborate when you refer to having access to a network of sites, as most things I have seen and heard along these lines have been horror stories insofar as SEO companies 'leveraging' their own networks to rank clients. Just curious for your input.

I am also working such a company.tedious work!

Interesting question. Hm.. I'm wondering how they do that too. In my opinion, I think these companies have powerful networks. Plus, they outsource a good number of employees. For content related works for example, they would hire a good number of writers and ask these writers a minimum number of articles daily. Then for each project, one submitter is assigned. In order to cope with deadlines, some companies give incentives.

Great Discussions! Most of The SEO Services have Their own Websites and Blogs from where They Get Back Links Effectively! As Far as Highly Trained SEO professionals are Concerned Most of The Companies have Only Link Builders which Don't have ability to Think Out of The Box!

Yes! I Agree with all the points made here.

Most of the SEO companies have their own websites/blogs and they are regularly doing on page and off page for those websites/blogs.

I had worked in a SEO company for 2 years and they have websites/blogs in all niches. So if they get website for SEO they will just analyze what the keywords are and place those keywords in template. So that the particular keyword will surely get a great start in case of SERP.

And then they will just maintain the site sith bacic link building techniques.

So.....the question is can an IMER beat an SEO company in terms of ranking for that particular KW? Or is that pointles?

I will not name the company but used a SEO company named in topseos.com and think they might be using an automated system for social bookmarking probably. Anyway it might have been a mistake to shell out the money to them but well anyone have any recommendations for social bookmarking submitter?

Its good to hear from someone in a real seo company Mike as to what is done in real seo companies rather than the multitude of jokers one can get on these type of forums pretending to be seo gurus when they clearly are not

I think it really depends on the company. Most obviously have huge resources at their disposal - major newspaper contacts (even I know a few, so I imagine a large agency has hundreds of connections), vast private blog networks and other quality resources.

I also know that a lot of those same pro companies order cheaper services on IM forums. Even simple stuff like bookmarking. Believe it or not, we get a lot of $25 orders for simple blasts to sites like (not going to name the company publicly) Standard & Poor’s Ratings, etc. Most of the time they target press releases and various research papers/reports with those.

It depends.

Yeah I agree Mike, you make some very solid points. I had long suspected that was how the major white hat SEO companies operate and it is interesting to hear those suspicions confounded. I'm a very small fish also and the thought of building a network of relevant sites solely for the purposes of boosting client's rankings is daunting to say the least. It simply makes it all the more challenging for us little guys to compete and all the more rewarding if we do!!

They use a ready-to-do list with "instructions" and each time they do the same (because their strategy is great!)

Big SEO companies have their own networks with high pagerank and traffic.

OP here. Thanks again to everyone who has chimed in so far.

As I mentioned above, I just got hired by a small company to attempt to bring this guy's six e-commerce websites back from the grave. Unfortunately I am new to SEO and he has me emailing random webmasters and directory owners that link to our competitors to see about getting a link. Needless to say I hardly ever get a response, and most of them want money for links. I keep trying to tell him that we really have to start paying for links but he is insistent that quality links can be had with enough detective work. You can imagine my stress levels when at the end of the day he complains nothing is getting done since we don't have any links (he is not very technologically savvy). Thank GOD he is going to be interviewing someone from an SEO company tomorrow who does consulting work on the side, and can hopefully back me up on the suggestions I've been making to him (mostly that we need to pay for links).

But I'm fascinated with how these SEO companies work, and am just wondering how they go about acquiring these networks. Do they bribe bloggers to give up their high PR sites? Do they solicit existing influential bloggers to contract with them? Do they simply invest time and resources into building hundreds of high PR blogs that they can then use to host their clients' links? That seems like it would take a millenia.

Anyway, as I said, I'm new to SEO, but it is something I want to do professionally and I am determined to know this stuff despite my new gig throwing me for a loop.

Solid points from everyone but technically .. Most SEO companies will simply say "We do whitehat methods only" but actually they are using some blackhat methods also

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@Rogers.. i would imagine this method is mainly reserved for the smaller guys who do not have a high PR network of sites to put links on. but it definitely seems to be a common method, as there are large companies out there who will provide white label SEO.

As I said to another poster I don't want to represent that all SEO pros use networks or even only networks. Buying links in one shape or another is however pretty rampant plus creating linkbait is another tactic. the problem with just contacting people and asking them for a link to a commercial site is a matter of motivation. Most webmasters are going to look at it like spam - why in the world should I give you a link? The other use of aged domains that you would have in your network is to do three way links with webmasters but yeah going blindly in with emailing people to get links is going to be a frustrating process because theres no incentive.

I haven't analysed the work done by top SEOs in the US but I have for many leading SEO companies in the UK. Unfortunately, use of obvious mixed content networks (that they own) is rampant.