Purchasing backlinks depends on the provider - many providers create link farms that are very dangerous because your site can get punished. You can look for well-known SEO companies that offer link building services and then you will be on the safe side. The best way is natural link building, meaning to do the research and outreach yourself. Guest posting in blogs from relevant niches is the best way from our experience. There are companies that do link building via natural means - by contacting the webmasters of blogs or sites that don't explicitly sell links and require quality content. Last by not least, you can determine which providers are safe by checking their prices - if they sell huge quantities for small amounts of money (100 links for $100) then something is obviously wrong.

How many keywords do you have? Is the keyword you made top 10 for is competitive enough and has a sufficient number of searches.

You can check this stuff with Rank Tracker's keyword research module: SEO PowerSuite training videos

Good for you! Actually, investing in content is the best strategy possible. Because it's the content that brings you backlinks and traffic.

I wouldn't recommend that.

Perhaps you should come up with a comprehensive
SEO strategy rather than just purchasing backlinks
blindly. You could try out tiered link building, though it
can be very demanding if you are doing it on your own

Build backlinks manually and gradually. If you rank on page 1 without backlinks, I assume your competition is not that hard so just create links manually from article directories, social bookmarking, web 2.0s and wikis. Make sure to do it steadily on the daily basis

Build you own back-links on sites that are related to your niche. You can do many things to get backlinks. Write a guest post for them, reach out and ask them to put your link on a page with a broken link.

The safest route is often the slowest, yet best, route. It will have a longer term effect, without much risk of being penalized.

Buying links is risky. At the very least, you should be allowed to see exactly where the backlink(s) would be placed before paying for it. If that is not allowed, then you may want to walk away.


1 You could guest post on blogs and article sites, with the ability to include a link in the post.
2 Write real, original comments on related blogs and forums (include in your sig).
3 Contact related or complementary sites and offer to do a link exchange.
4 Contact people and ask if they would link to your related page. It doesn't hurt to ask.
5 Check backlinks of your competitors to find out who is linking to their pages. See if you could also get a backlink.

Slow and steady is the rule of thumb with safe, effective link building. I think it's also important to remember that many IT-type people also don't want to call other webmasters.

With this in mind, I often call other site owners to:

a) establish a more-human point of contact
b) help to develop a lasting business relationship with that webmaster

However, admittedly, sometimes you just have to pay to play the game—esp. if you want hi PR links.

After all, one hi PR link in a relevant site about a relevant topic to your KW/industry can we worth 100's of low volume posts or spun article submissions. So, you also need to weigh up if $25-$100 (value of most non-directory, paid links) is worth more than 12 hours of your time.

Lastly, while you do have to be careful, most reputable sites are run by reputable people that also want to succeed at what they are doing. Treat them right, pay for the value they are giving you and it will often result in a win-win for you both.

For backlink analysis, look at SEO Powersuites "SEO Spyglass". You'll need 100+ paid proxies and about 25k captcha for a solid month of running that software, but it provides a comprehensive list of links that your competition has—including page rank, link source, anchor text, link destination, age of link etc..... it's not a perfect program, but IME, it's one of the best available.

Good luck!

Get some social media likes, it will help to boost your rankings and also drive some traffic

You are in a good position currently, you can boost your position to top 3 if you build quality backlinks along with content.
There is a big difference in buying backlinks, and buying a service that will manually build natural backlinks for your site.