What strategies to best use to boost rankings across long-tail articles on site?

[Cairmen]

Heya!

I'm currently engaged in what appears to be a slightly unusual SEO task. I run a large, reasonably well-respected (but not global-standard, yet) site that I'm currently monetising through individual articles targetted at addressing specific search engine queries that I know have decent traffic.

It's the EHow / Demand Media model, except with a focus on a single specific (video games) niche, and much, much better quality articles (sufficiently good that they attract a fair amount of praise - all the writers on the site are published authors and the quality's damn high).

Most of our articles end up ranking with essentially no backup, but they don't rank high - usually 2nd or 3rd page of Google. I'm trying to determine what the most effective strategy would be for us to boost our article rankings with the least possible expense / effort (we don't have a huge budget).

Our long-tail articles are mostly being trumped by articles with either a couple of external links to them or by other articles with no links but from a site with significantly higher Domain Authority (70+ to our 48).I'm working to improve our on-page optimisation, but it's already pretty good (an "A" report from the SEOMoz tools on most or all pages).

So, I'm wondering what the best use of our time would be to increase traffic globally across the site. Strategies I'm considering:

1. Focussing on building links to the homepage and to any other pages on the site, by asking for links from community members, doing linkbait articles, directory submissions, guest blogging, and so on. Long-term aim: increase our domain-wide MozRank and MozTrust.
2. Build links to our long-tail articles specifically, most popular first. Get direct links from relevant blogs, press releases, social bookmarking, etc. Long-term aim: get to #1 on Google one page at a time.
3. Something Else?

I'm wondering what the big SEO brains here would suggest?

Happy to provide additional details if it would help!

[TheARKlady]

Since I have a lot of small businesses that I market with new content, I would suggest you take a closer look at the long tails you are using and make sure you have all the on page elements in place to work for you.

I am sure some of the veteran folks here will give you some valuable input on other strategies but here are mine from a writing perspective:

If you are not linking to external sites, make sure you are using your long tail kw phrase to interlink on the site.

Titles, headers, and author bios should also be tight. Your first link anchor text will also be valuable. Consider archiving by author as well as by topic.

If you are using a CMS such as Word Press, consider implementing a related article plugin so you can further drive traffic to related articles.

Finally, if  you are not using social media--get a Facebook page (not profile) and Twitter account going so you can share the links of your new and previous articles.

YouTube is the number three search engine so you might post some teasers to attract traffic and make sure you optimize your channels in the social media landscape.

I've had good luck with using these tactics for clients. Looking forward to seeing what others have to say.

[Cairmen]

Thanks!

I'm already doing most of this, I must admit. I'm using the Keyword Strategy plugin to do internal linking using exact keyword phrases, although I could probably optimise the number of places I'm doing that on the site a bit more.

Titles and headers are fairly optimised already - although from reading the SEOMoz reports, I understand header tags have a very small SEO effect anyway?

We've already got a Twitter, Facebook, Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, and Tumblr presence, so I think we're reasonably covered there!

Things I'm not doing, and will probably start - thanks for the suggestions -

There's a related articles plugin I should be installing - thanks for recommending that, I'd forgotten I meant to do it.

First link anchor text I must admit I'm not optimising - can you explain a bit more or suggest a resource I could check?

Thanks again for these suggestions!

[TheARKlady]

Make sure you have links back to your site from the social media too. Might already have it but never hurts to review.

I always optimize all page elements because you never know when things change. I tend to use H2/H3 in those I am looking to have rank using the kw phrase.

When you construct a post, the first link gets some weight and so using anchor text  with an emphasis can help. I use it in the first or second sentence generally. I also use the main site phrase in an anchor link call to action at the bottom.

This reminds me, since you are doing a lot of videos, you might create a short commentary below the video and make sure you have the alt optimized for the video topic.

Hope that is helpful.

[Cairmen]

Hmm, now that is an interesting idea. Do alt tags for video correlate with ranking as strongly as alt tags for images?

Thanks - these are all useful ideas!

[TheARKlady]

Since the search engines aren't very good with videos yet, that is the reason behind the practice. For clients, I also always try to include a brief summary below to help out a bit more. Never hurts to cover all the bases!