Three alternatives for SEO: Buy links, Agency or Charity?

In case you have a budget for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) what would you choose:
1) Buy links
2) Hire a SEO agency
3) Charity – Donations

Buy links for SEO

This relatively simple as you just buy links from different suppliers in order to boost your PageRank quickly and effortlessly.
However these paid links won’t last forever as the PR of these websites can change fairly quickly as Google tries to eliminate this type of business as it influences and falsifies their website evaluation.
Moreover the search engines are aware of these paid links and it is likely your website will be penalized instead of being promoted in PR.

Hire a SEO Agency

You hire a SEO agency, which will evaluate your business and website in order to fix and improve your website. Fairly soon you will see an improvement in SERP, an increase of traffic and eventually the PR will increase too.
However:
- Every time content is added to the website, the SEO Agency needs come in and help out
- As soon as the search engines change their rules the SEO Agency needs to change their ‘black hat’ tricks.
In both cases more invoices need to be paid.

Charity – Donations for SEO

You donate your entire budget to several different charities, good causes, schools, universities or community projects, having a website with medium or high PageRank. (In order to know the Pagerank of the charities use a PageRank Checker tool.)
The main goal and condition for donation is to have a link on their website.
All these links will help to improve very effectively the PR and the SERP and thus increase traffic.
Normally these links have a long life span, thus the SEO effect is long lasting and budget of next year can be spend on other charities and update the current donations.

Additionally all the people involved in the projects or organizations will know your company name and will praise you and your company. Thus you create a WOM (word of mouth) propaganda, which still is the best marketing around.
And with a bit of luck you will even make it to the local newspapers or cable channel.

Of course this ‘advertising’ and ‘linking’ isn’t the objective of charity, but hasn’t the spending on charity been misused since ever for business reasons?

What would you choose for SEO?