All SEOs are aware of Google's Webmaster Guidelines, and they also know that Google gives much importance to quality and theme-based links. But Google also mentions in their Webmaster Guidelines that buying and selling links for link juice is a violation of the guidelines.

Everyone knows that buying and selling links for link juice can negatively impact your site's ranking in search results. Still, so many people are buying links for ranking purposes, thinking that only links are important in SEO. I also found some websites which rank in Google only on the basis of paid links, even though there is no proper title, description, no proper content, no proper internal link structure, etc. And the webmasters of those sites think of themselves as SEO experts.

What do you think? Is buying links a responsibility of an SEO?

If only buying links makes one an SEO, then nobody will recruit SEOs and nobody will hire SEOs. Anybody can easily carry out the task of link buying. As an SEO, you have to generate more revenue with less expense, but if you are buying links for $1000 a month, then is it really good for your business?

If you are an SEO, then you have skills that combine on page and off page factors in order to rank well in Google.

There are so many ways of getting links, like:

• Directory submission
• Press release submission
• Article submission
• Links from Flickr
• Links from Yahoo! Answers
• Creating blogs on free servers
• Guest blogging on related blogs
• Social bookmarking
• Creating profiles on social networking sites
• Providing free WP themes and generate the links
• Links from forum profiles

Now, you may have many questions about the methods I have mentioned as ways of getting links. For one, what about the quality of things like theme based links? You all know that links from Yahoo! Answers, Flickr and most social bookmarking sites are nofollowed, and links from directory pages and article pages take too much time to crawl, so you will not see the search ranking results of those links. However, if you have less quality links then you might give more consideration to on page optimization. Proper on page optimization will definitely help your ranking.

If you are to consider yourself an SEO expert, then you should have all these things:

• Three or more years experience in the field of SEO
• Experience working on multiple projects in multiple industries
• The drive to update your knowledge of SEO on daily basis
• Knowledge of .htaccess commands and server side issues
• Knowledge of various programming languages such as PHP, ASP, CFM, etc.
• Knowledge of marketing concepts

Why should an SEO Expert have all these things?

• It is necessary to have minimum three years' experience because one SEO project often takes three months to one year for results to show in search engines. In three years, you should have seen success in a minimum of six projects within different industries with different platforms. Success of a website is determined by whether that site generates good revenue and that revenue increases day by day. Just getting ranked is not enough in SEO.
• It is not necessarily true that if you achieve rankings in one particular industry, you can rank in other industries just as easily. You have to analyze other industries and also analyze the strategies of your potential competitors.
  
• In SEO, there are lot of updates on a daily basis. It is therefore necessary that you update your knowledge on a daily basis. You can update your SEO knowledge through forums and SEO blogs.
• I find that so many people calling themselves an SEO expert don’t know about .htaccess files. It is necessary for SEO experts to have a grasp of .htaccess commands and server side issues, as they can affect websites' rankings.
• For SEO experts, it is not totally necessary, but it is beneficial to have a knowledge of various programming languages such as ASP, PHP, CFM and .Net, etc. Sometimes developers are not aware of SEO practices, so knowing programming languages means that an SEO can suggest the solutions that a person without programming knowledge would not be able to offer.
  
• SEO means not only achieving rankings in Google, Yahoo and Live; it's just one facet of online marketing. After getting rankings, you have to check that visitors actually visit the site! Furthermore, if visitors come to a website, how quickly do they leave? Do they buy products, or "convert" in other ways? In short, you have to generate targeted traffic and develop business more and more.

Now tell me, does a link buyer know all these things? If he or she knows all these things, then why are they buying links? Do you think that a link buyer is an SEO expert?