For you who have manually SEO and build links your sites, you might find that SEO and link building take loads of your time and money. If you own a site, this might not be a major problem for you. But what if you run a network of websites? SEO and link building are headaches.

The most common alternative you want to do go is to hire SEO specialists and link builders. The problem is, this alternative is expensive, ranging from hundreds of dollars to thousands of dollars on monthly basis. Alternatively, you can use tools to help you do SEO and link building semi-manually to leverage your time and money.

You could hire freelancers on webmaster forums, but despite the services seem affordable, if not cheap, the quality is rarely in the “good enough” zone. Moreover, hiring freelancers to run SEO and link building campaigns on large number of sites can be expensive, eventually.

Directory submissions, RSS Feed submissions, paid reviews, text link ads, banner ads, etc. – all whitehat one-way backlinking methods can wear you out and burn you down, eventually.

However, there’s a great solution: Self-service or semi-automated SEO and link building services, available usually for directory submissions and article marketing activities.

Many consider article marketing as the most effective way of building links to get your sites to rank better on search engine result pages. For you who fave article marketing above all other SEO and link building strategies, you might want to consider these white-hat SEO services: SEOLinkVine and LinkVana.

I have got my hands dirty with both and here are my reviews:

SEOLinkVine

SEOLinkVine is basically an online system that allowing you to post your articles to the system and let the system handles your article distribution. Unlike many article submission tools available today, your articles will be posted on quality blogs. So yes, SEOLinkVine is essentially an article marketing system.

The blogs to where the system posts your articles to are not actually owned by SEOLinkVine. Those blogs are submitted into the system, and will need to meet a certain criteria (e.g. no splogs or spam blogs) to ensure the quality of the network.

The above means that if you are not interested in article marketing but are interested in getting your blogs filled with quality, unique content instead, you can join the network for free. The articles will be posted to your blog via XML-RPC – so yes, your blogs should be XML-RPC-ready (WordPress blogs are XML-RPC-ready.) It’s a win-win situation, really.

Pros:

• You can use markings, i.e. { variation 1 | variation 2 | variation 3 }, to make an article to have many unique variations (a.k.a. “spinnable”) – you only need to submit one article with markings and the system will take care the distribution.
• Your links are of course “dofollow”, with a big upside – the anchor texts are “spinnable.”
• Analytics to monitor the progress of your sites ranking on search engines on your targeted keywords.
• Affordable pricing of $50 / month.

Cons:

• Despite being monitored, members’ blogs quality can be less than what you expect.
• You can’t really control backlink quality – you could get links from blogs with PageRank 0 or with the same IP address, resulting in reduced link values.
• Limited customization allowed in article posting frequencies and such.

I can get on average 10 published article variations for each article – quite good, could be definitely more if I outsource the article writing to good writers. If I submit 50 unique articles/month (with 2 outbound links each,) along with many variations for each article to the systems, I could get about 50 x 2 x 10 = 1,000 back links – not bad at all for few hours of work.

LinkVana

Similar to SEOLinkVine, LinkVana is an article marketing system that publishes your articles to quality blogs. So not much to mention differently here, except one major difference: The blogs to which your article is posted is LinkVana’s – so, your backlink quality can be assured.

Unlike SEOLinkVine’s “spinnable” articles, LinkVana takes snippets from each of your unique content automatically – so no markings needed.

Pros:

• All blogs are LinkVana-owned and guaranteed to have PageRank 2 to PageRank 5, aged and have 1000s of inbound links on each – so quality is out of question.
• Huge blog network that grows 50-100 blogs each month.
• You are guaranteed to get backlinks from different class C IP address.
• You can control posting frequency and other options.

Cons:

• Pricing is a bit turn-off: $147 / month (25% discount of $197 /month for the first 300 members.)
• The system uses snippets, not markings – so if you want more variations on a single article, you might need a help of quality article rewriter tool, such as Magic Article Rewriter.

And the winner is…

For me: SEOLinkVine! $50 a month for unlimited submissions of articles and article variations are just the best fit to my budget. Also, I do need the analytic feature they offer.

Click here to see what SEOLinkVine can do »

However, if quality is your number one concern, you should go to LinkVana, instead – incoming backlinks are of higher quality, and for the long term, this is probably better; $147 / month is well worth it!

Click here to see what LinkVana can offer you »