SEO, where to start?!?

There is a lot of information about SEO on the net. However, reading through it all and finding out (the hard way) which strategies work best can take a long time. Do any of you guys have a "mission-critical" to do list in order of priority (eg, 1. keywords, 2. titles, 3. formatting, 4 links to site etc etc). Any advice would be really appreciated.

Thanks again.

 

Personally I am a firm believer in starting at square one ... the code.

Over the past year I have proven over and over that the cleaner the code is (and the less there is) can dramatically help with rankings and indexes! I get a lot of grief for it too but its proven itself so often I'll never stop telling people about it.

After that a good place to start is the big three:

title - url - heading tags

but of course the king of them all is good, targeted content.

Oh and remember, you don't optimize a site you optimize each page on a site!

 

Thanks a lot. dc,

Targeted content? How would that be different from "standart" content?

 

TARGETED means content with good keyword density and not a collaborate jumble of all kinds of articles, news, etc - keep it on one topic.

 

And 2nd on your list will be link building.You have to get as much as possible relevant niche site links.This will help you to get index by Search Engine.

 

Would you say that contet/formatting and link building are the most important steps? Are there some useful guidelines that are a good place to start off with? Thanks.

 

I can say it's the Basic of SEO.
You need to read lot of articles about SEO.
And spend more time reading some previous post on reputable webmaster forums like DP,SP and etc.

 

Links can help you, but they are really way too time consuming and unprofittable. Content and design is really what is going to get you golden, and how you advertise. You need to be seen, not by the masses, but by exactly who is looking for what you are offering. Be it products, info, whatever, getting traffic is a waste of time unless you are extracting cash from them.

It is all about conversion rates, if you are converting 1:30 your on the right track, but you need to be getting 1:15-25. Play with adwords and yahoo, with correctly marketing your specific keywords, you can pull in hundreds of dollars every day with no more work than monitoring your position and payments.

IDK what you are promoting, but it will most definately involve you correctly marketing keywords, and have a visually and informationally appealing site that people will be attracted to go to.

SRDS is great, but minimum $700 investment, and that is literally only for the list of companies who you then purchase specific infno. So for the srds to really work you need a 50-100,000 investment minumum, otherwise you are wasting your time and money trying to get info for less than this.

Options are always open, just stay at your computer and do the research/work. We can al tell you do this do that, but unless you do it and learn for yourself you will be just as lost. Best of luck, any specific questions regarding your business, not just seo i mean.

 

i guess it should be thinking on "how to make a quality site" not "how to optimize a site". i think that's the real key on optimizing one.

 

Thanks for your input (this will keep us busy this millenium ;-)

.

 

Regarding important texts on our site, would you recon that it's better to use <h1> - <h6> as opposed to custom ".subheader" and ".another-css" -type of tags? (from an SEO-point of view?)

 

1) Content
2) Submit to directories
3) Use Digg

 

Start with the domain. Do a check at archive.org to make sure someone else didn't wreck it in the SEs yet.

Then site structure - how the pages/topics relate to each other.

Next is content.

Then code.

Then publicity, including links.

A lot of SEO is just making sure you aren't getting in the way. Clean code helps. Making sure the domain you want is ok is essential. A bit of homework to determine traffic expectations and competition is good too.

 

Thanks.

OK, this has probably been asked many many times, but in your professional oppinion, is there a not too complex, but yet very specific guide bood/articles that can give companies advice on SEO in specific? I know this knowledge changes every day, but surely there are some articles written on the net that stand out from the rest. N.B. I'm talking articles that are specific with examples as opposed to talk BS.

 

I always approach from a white-hat point of view - nothing dodgy that'll exclude the site from a search engine:

1. Build your site using XHTML and CSS. Moving the presentation to a seperate file means your content is easier for a search engine to read.
2. Use semantic HTML: proper headings h1, h2, h3, etc and strong and em. Always make the best use of your page titles - they are critical for many reasons!
3. Write good quality content. Search engines may provide visitors, but only your content has the power to keep them! This means striking a balance between good use of keywords and phrases and keeping it readable!
4. Focus on building inbound links. Sure, you can use directories, etc, but also get active in your niche - comment on blogs, look at social bookmarking sites for what others are saying about your topic area. If you increase your visibility, people will begin linking to you naturally.
5. Links within and to your blog are important. Not just to the homepage, but to individual pages within the site too. The text used in internal and inbound links tends to have a higher weighting, so make it count!

There may be other stuff, but this is what immediately springs to mind.

 

I would suggest that anyone starting out and wanting to do SEO is to read everything that you find on the subject.

Put together a small project and apply what you have read and document your success and failures along the way. Then, next time, you do SEO on a site you will have some data to work with.

I wrote a whole series of articles on what worked for me with some sites and SEO is an ongoing process - Part of which you consider when making the site, and more of the continual work to do once the site is live. You cannot walk away from SEO and expect to stay at the top of the SERPS. You should plan on it taking 3-6 months to feature in the SERPS and 12 Months to top the SERPS for your keywords if you do everything right.

If you get there sooner, then that is great - if you never get there then it simply means you have more work to do.

My List is basically,

keyword research,
domain name research
create site
use title tags correctly
each page try and have 1 h1, 2 h2, and 3 h3 tags with relavent keywords,
validate site
use css to seperate content from display.
submit site to SE's manually,
add links to site from my existing sites.
add links in forum signatures to my sites.
write at least 1 article about my site and submit it to some article directories.
submit my site to at least 5 directories week.
check my competition and see if I can improve my site - to make it better than them.