Advice for brand new site

[JamesT]

Dear All

I have been an SEO for several years now, and have just laucnhed a new site www.householdsaver.co.uk its in its early stages as I expect to add a community option where people post deals and offers they have found, share them with friends etc

My question is really are all the old seo practices still worth doing? Things like directory sites, blog comments, articles sites, social bookmarking etc.... (I have already built up twitter users on the account before the site went live)

With Moz's trust factor is it best to go for highrank trust sites first or...

I guess you could say that I am suffering from what do I do first and is it all still worth doing and what are the early pit falls to think about..? ie too many links too soon and from to high or to low trusted sites?

Any comments from anyone who have put a new site live in the past couple of years would be appricated.

Thanks

James

[RikkiD22]

In my opinion the 'old seo practices' are still worth doing. The link building you mention will all still add strength to the domain, just be a bit more strict on the type of sites you build links from.

As for where to start first I normally start getting all the on page and technical stuff sorted first before I start link building.

[JamesT]

Thanks for your reply

[PeterAlexLeigh]

Generally link building from directories and the like can still have a positive effect as long as you don't let the link profile of the site get too spammy. A link profile filled with just spammy links is bound to raise google's eyebrows and you may find your site being devalued because of it.

If I'm building links I tend to look out for the following;

1. If the MozRank of a site is 1.5+ points higher than the page rank, then there's probably something fishy going on and you may want to avoid getting a link from that source

2. If the site has many, many links coming in, but only from a small amount of domains then again, probably something fishy there, which google could easily pick up on.

3. Gut instinct. If the site looks spammy as hell and has a rubbish human editing approach then you may well want to avoid it.

Remember there are plenty of decent directories about such as Yahoo! directory and Best of the Web.

Also, you're less likely to create bad links if you find directories and blogs that are relevant to your site. So if you find household directories or money saving sites, then google will have less reason to devalue the links.

Lastly, check out SEOMoz's beginners guide http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo - Don't let the 'beginners' part put you off, there's some great up to date tips and links in there that will help any SEO.

[JamesT]

thanks Shelly, I already added the site to yahoo's directory and will look at best of the web, and I agree on relevant links and will use my tools with what you have said in mind re small amount of domains and had never thought about what the difference in moz rank to page rank means before, so i will ponder on that!!, - I will have a refresh on the moz beginners page! best James

[PeterAlexLeigh]

Yeah MozRank to PageRank is a reasonable measure to use. MozRank should usually be about the same as PageRank, so if PageRank is a lot lower, you can infer that Google have applied an penalty to that site and reduced it's page rank.

Because page rank isn't updated often, there are times when it's not always accurate, but usually it's a good indicator.