SEO-strategy building questions

[ArtemKay]

This post is deleted!

[EGOL]

It sounds like you are an ambitious person who wants to take control of the SEO for your company.  SEOmoz is a great place to get started.

The best thing to do is develop a detailed plan for your SEO.  This begins with with the goals that your company has for the website, the message that you want to communicate, where you want it to be visible (keywords and social sites) and what you want people to do when they arrive at your site.  These things will determine the content of your site, contribute to the design, determine the navigation and also determine the SEO strategies that will be successful.

The SEO for a website intended to attract customers to a local business confined to a limited geographic area is very different from what is needed for a website that will compete in a national or global market.

Which are you seeking advice for?

The SEOmoz Beginner's Guide is a great place to start.  Read it twice if you have not done that already.  http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

Also important for anyone who gives advice to know is the relative difficulty of the keywords that you are targeting (you don't need to reveal the exact keywords if you prefer to keep that private - but rather the industry and country where you are working).  You don't want to spend $1000 attacking a target that would require $50,000.  It is important to know if you have the resources to compete effectively.

Are you after a small niche market with low competition or will you need a massive effort to take on firmly entrenched competition?

So, my advice for you would be to back up and make a plan for the above.  Then ask specific questions as they arise with background from your plan that will help people give you good answers.  Then, instead of attacking everything everywhere with a shotgun you can attack specific targets with a small number of carefully placed arrows.

You could receive lots of advice based upon the limited information that you have posted but it might not be specifically for what you really need - thus result in a waste of time and resources.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Artem,

Sadly you were given something all too common - fake SEO services.  There are many great, and real SEO companies out there, but some people just want to make a quick buck regardless of the wreckage they create.

Without seeing your site, I can't offer specific recommendations, however from your list of questions it sounds like you need real, quality SEO knowledge.  What you do on-site and off-site has to be based on SEO best practices.

Basic concepts:

Every page on your site should be optimized for two or at most, three highly related two or three word phrases, with an additional two or three highly related alternate phrases added within the content.

Each page you want to optimize should generally have anywhere from a few hundred upwards of a thousand words - the exact length is not as critical as much as it's being unique content written in natural language - write to your audience.  And each page should have more unique content within the main content area than the combined total content around it - headers, sidebars, footers...

Your home page should be seeded with the most important phrases.

Indbound links should be made up with anchor text that's a mix of important keyword phrases pointed to their relevant related pages on your site, as well as links that have anchor text that's your brand name pointed to your home page.

Paid directories are much less valuable than they used to be.  Article directories are a lot less valuable as well since Google made their major "Panda" update between February and April of this year.  And as such, I don't recommend spending time on them.

If you provide services, there should be a primary services page linked from the main site navigation.  That page should then link to each individual service you offer.  And in that section of the site, there should be a sub-navigation system where that sub-navigation links to each service page from each service page.

It also helps to have microdata-encoded navigation breadcrumbs - text links that appear at the top of the content area on each page, that shows visitors exactly where in the site they are.

I also recommend the following reading:

The Periodic Table of SEO - by Danny Sullivan - it's a great core SEO resource to help you learn what things are important.

Local SEO best practices by David Mihm (if you have any location based offerings)

Guide to Local Listings and Google Places by Tony Verre (again, if you have location based offerings)

And check out Sphinn.com and SERPD.com to stay up to date on great SEO content from around the web.  They're editorially controlled sites so only real SEO information is shared.

Then finally let's not forget the invaluable information here at SEOmoz!  The "Learn SEO" section is invaluable. As is the Beginners Guide to SEO.

[ArtemKay]

Thank you for your reply,

I realize now that I had to provide more information about our website.

It is an international social network for extreme sports enthusiasts. At this point our main target is to attract readers and contributors. The content is user-generated (blogs, wiki) and in my personal opinion it is our greatest advantage at this point: we have plenty of unique and useful content.

As I understand the competition for some quality keywords is pretty low, for example google shows 0.1 competition for keywords with 500,000 monthly searches.

We do have reasonable resources including the team of writers that update the website regularly.

Cheers,

[ArtemKay]

Thank you for your reply,

You have said that directories and article websites are not as important anymore, then what is the best way to place links on the regular basis. Obviously networking with bloggers, submitting news to respectable websites ect seems to be the best way to get links, but are those the only strategies to use?

[DavidKonigsberg]

FYI-

Use the keyword difficulty tool in seomoz instead of the google adwords tool (talks about paid competition not seo) to determine if a keyword is hard or not for seo.