You want to have lots of links so you rank high, but you can't do that by buying links. They're fairly worthless. A good alternative is all the linking you get

You want to have lots of links so you rank high, but you can't do that by buying links. They're fairly worthless. A good alternative is all the linking you get from press, guest posts on external sites (though I feel like that ship has probably sailed since when I found it effective a few years back), and generally making sure there's a lot of organic seeming backlinks to an array of sites with diversity in anchor text as well. So if I had $5k now to spend: 0. Do an audit or have someone do an audit to see that you're not screwing something up completely. 1. AdWords, if you know that you convert well enough to turn a profit. 2. Internal content stuff: a blog, whitepapers, whatever. 3. External content stuff: 20 backlinks on >PR3 sites should move the needle for sure. $5k may also do nearly nothing at all depending on what you're trying to rank for. Even medium-sized eCommerce folks probably spend $20k a month on getting backlinks from external sites.