How is an SEO's time best used?

[DaveGerecht]

We have over 50 highly varied and niche sites in our company. Each website is for an annual event spread across the calendar.

I am the solo SEO person here and was wondering what your opinions are about what would bring in the greatest SEO power in my limited daily allotment; link building? Keywords? Content?

Oh, and to make my life even easier - its all based on SharePoint 2007!

[asimahme]

I would focus on creating a stream of unique valuable content on your website, the reason why I say content is because of the following:

• More Content on website helps increase Domain Authority (Links to a better job of this)
• Good Content can be linkworthy (acquire links organically)
• More content gives your website more opportunities to gain the longtail search traffic

Obviously try to use your ideal "keywords" that will convert your traffic into customers or leads for whatever you are selling or promoting.

Depending on how much time you really have for SEO, Linkbuilding should be a priority, without links you are not going to gain the ranking and traffic you would want to have.

So here is how I would rank your priorities for SEO:

1. Keywords
2. Content
3. Linkbuilding/Social Media

Hope this helps

[EGOL]

If I was going to allocate company resources in response to an answer to this question I would want that answer to be based upon good and complete information.  Needed for a good answer is an evaluation of your content, evaluation of your competitive position, evaluation of your inbound links, evaluation of your current SEO and more.

Any answer that is given without these evaluations is a guess and could direct you to spend time/money where it will not be effective.  Also, the answer will probably not be the same for each of your sites.

So, instead of giving you an answer that could be really wrong my advice would be to hire someone who can spend the time needed to provide a good and competent answer.

[Gyi]

First, spend some time auditing technical aspects. Be sure you're not "getting in your own way" by doing something technically unsound (duplicating page titles, robots.txt problems, etc).

I also suggest dedicating a majority of resources to content. It would be helpful to know a little more about the nature of your sites.

After content, I would dedicate the remaining resources to link building in the form of getting your best content in front of the right audiences. That's your most efficient shot at acquiring new links, shares, etc.

[asimahme]

I agree, before you do anything it's best to take some time and asses your current metrics, statistics, rankings, etc in order to determine where your most time should be spent on SEO.

[DaveGerecht]

Thanks for the help Asim!

Luckily our keywords are quite niche but content is difficult to get hold of because of this speciality. I'm going with linkbuilding and social media on this one!

[DaveGerecht]

Thanks EGOL for your answer.

We have:

little content, (I am working on fixing that)

few competitors in this, an exceptionally niche market

some inbound links from .edu and .gov sites but nothing astonishing

Basically I can only do actions to all or none of the sites as they theoretically receive the same level of attention from me.

[EGOL]

Is there genuine search volume for these events and if there is how do you rank in the SERPs for the important terms?

[DaveGerecht]

EGOL - thanks again for all of the help. To answer your questions;

The search volume isn't very high - maybe globally in the thousands according to SEOMoz's Keyword Difficulty Tool.

We rank high generally in the SERPs for the important terms.

From all of the answers here, and obviously knowing how things work in my company, I'm leaning heavily towards focusing my energies on link building with a secondary focus on creating new content.

[EGOL]

Since you are ranking well already.  I would think that the linkbuilding is not "urgent" - especially if the people doing the searching are highly interested in the event and are likely to visit more than one website.

My first priority then would be to define what content should be on these sites?  What is "the minimum"? What would be "ideal"? And, what would be "kickass"?

Once I have that I would get "minimum" on every site then start to get "ideal" everywhere. Only then would I try to get links if the links that I am trying to get are given on merit.

I would try to get "kickass" content on the sites that are most important or the ones that face heavy competition.

[DaveGerecht]

EGOl - again, you have really helped!

You definitely are an SEO Guru!!