Seo Link Building Strategy - How are the big companies building links?

Hey everyone,



I've been in the ecommerce industry for about a year now and am in the process of launching a new ecommerce site related to womens clothing. I have spent a lot of time doing research on SEO, particularly as it relates to internal site structure and linking, site content, meta titles, and coding. There is a lot of solid research available on these topics and feel I have a good handle on those aspects of SEO. Im sure a lot of you have done the same. What I find really hard to get a good grasp on is effective link building. I know there are a lot of articles on ways to creatively get links, including good content creation, but many of them lack a strategy for link building. Should I be prodominently paying for links or organically building them through solid content? Each avenue has its own set of questions:



Buying Links:



How many links should I buy?

At what pace should I buy them (10/month)? What is considered conservative vs. aggressive?

Should I buy only high page rank links or a mix of low and high page rank sites? What is that combination?

How varied does my anchor text have to be?

What ratio should I have links going to my home page vs important internal pages that I am trying to rank for?



Organic Linking:



No matter how good the content, how do I get individuals to link to internal parts of the site with good anchor text?

Unless I'm writing fantastic content for every page I want to rank for, how do I get quality links to pages that I want to rank for but dont have fantastic content for?

I dont feel like ecommerce sites really get organically linked to. My gut tells me that most ecommerce companies buy their links, but again I'm not sure.



Ultimately, what would be helpful to me is some of your thoughts on how to get answers to these questions. I still dont know what the big companies are doing to build links....are they buying links or building them organically? Part of it is I know there is no right answer, and Im looking for intelligent, knowledgable people to discuss the issues with. Any one with any thoughts on this open ended post would be very much appreciated!!



Thanks!
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Don't garner too many links too quickly - Google will not like it.



If you buy links, make sure they are embedded within a block of relevant text, and make sure the anchor text is relevant.



Links sold in isolated boxes below the menu are useless and are quickly identified by Google.
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big companies (and i mean BIG) dont really build links. they get organic backlinks form branding and people just know their sites from wide range of marketing activities.
1$ paypal for each digg or stumbleupon that you make!
allot of big companies can just pay an office full of people to do the online branding for them like submitting thousands of links per day with a team of 100 or so



just following the same thing for your small site can have good dividends and outsourcing some of the boring stuff like submiting articles
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I have 4 sites on page 1 of google for tough kw and have not spent a dime on buying links, so it is a false belief that you have to buy links.