Most people who claim to be able to rank for arbitrary keywords are lying. Of the universe of people selling SEO services who also do link-building (n.b. not c

Most people who claim to be able to rank for arbitrary keywords are lying. Of the universe of people selling SEO services who also do link-building (n.b. not co-extensive), common ways to acquire links include: 1) Content marketing 2) Guest posting 3) Buying links 4) Private I'll-scratch-your-back-if-you-scratch-mine arrangements 5) Comment spamming 6) Controlling authoritative sites which can link to their own/client sites 7) Classical linkbuilding -- sending out lots of emails to people with related or unrelated websites asking them to link to your site These include several tactics which Google publicly discourages. You can automate or semi-automate portions of all of these strategies. It is really, really important that you understand the following sentence: Google will eventually describe as black hat any SEO strategy which both a) works and b) can be scaled algorithmically. Content marketing is, on current guidance from Big Daddy G, pretty lily white, but if you figure out a way how to do it such that you rank for [student credit cards] and [canon ink cartridge], your tactic will eventually receive adversarial attention from Google. If you had a client which was a painting service, you'd probably say "Look, you don't really want to rank for [painting service] worldwide. You want to rank for [painting service] in Worchestershire, which is the only region you actually service. We're going to do some table stakes onpage SEO to make that happen, make sure your Google Local data is accurate, and then try to solicit a few dozen links to your page via methods you don't care about. This will make you enough money to justify the $X00 I'm going to ask from you monthly for this." The answer is slightly more interesting if you're in more competitive markets than painting services in Worchestershire.