My business is pretty new and I am balancing it with part-time salaried work. I have very little time for SEO work and even less money, but I realise that better search engine ranking is an important part of getting my business to succeed. I've built the website myself and have a reasonable understanding of on page optimisation techniques. I am gradually optimising the content and I have seen promising results. However I don't really have a clue when it comes to off page optimisation. I currently have barely any back links (none according to Google search for link:mysite.co.uk) What should I do to get myself started start off? How would a day of SEO be best spent at this point?
Just keep in mind that its google job to return the most relevant result for x query. In order to rank well you have to make the site actually relevant. This is not done by hurling a bunch of random links at it. Additionally, as a matter of course, you don't want to pay attention to what folks think is effective SEO around here because its not effective or SEO. You are about to get a bunch of responses espousing things like linkwheels, blog commenting, forum posting and so on. If its offered in the services section here you can safely assume its what you don't want to do. Short answer is you want relevant merit based links. There are not entirely easy to come by per say but there is certainly a method to go about things. Some good places to read daily are as follows http://www.seomoz.org/blog http://www.seroundtable.com/ Those folks reside on the bleeding edge of the demographic. A bit methodology here that explains quite a bit and a fairly easy way to go about things and why http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1835616 hope that helps a bit, Nigel
Starting with those blogs, surfing around Digital Point and surfing around other forums are all great places to start. Make your site relevant, optimize the content for SEO then focus on getting quality backlinks from other websites to your site while continually updating your site
You should start creating reciprocal links, search engines love them. It's free, all you have to do is ask websites that have same similar niche you do for link exchanges. It works!
This is a prime example of what I am talking about. Reciprocal links have been dead for years and search engines hate them and frankly pay zero attention them. Too many of them and good bye rankings. Never wittingly swap links with people. In fact, that methodology was likely the 2nd to get cracked down on by Google right after stuffing your keyword tag and site. This is not new. What am suggesting its not news either. Its about 10 years old. Nigel
You should start with Search Engine Submission and proceed with Directory Submission, Forum Participation, Blog commenting.
Thanks for the comments posted on the thread so far. Nigel I have a feeling you may be right and I certainly intend on taking everything I read both here and elsewhere with a pinch of salt. I am of the school of thought where I want to build good content and have people link to my site organically as a result of what I have developed. The frustrating thing is that for this to happen people have to find my site and it seems that some 'less wholesome' SEO type stuff may have to be on the cards in order to achieve this. Mustang I understand quality backlinks are are the heart of achieving what I am after but as Nigel points out they are hard to come by especially as I am starting out. Coper I understand your point about reciprocal links and I am seriously considering calling in a few favours to get things off the ground but I am not sure this will benefit me in the long term. Most of my friends sites have low page ranking as well so I don't feel there is a great deal to be gained. I understand guest bogging might be a way to achieve a similar effect with better returns in terms of how relevant Google etc perceive the link to be. Rankwatch I am beginning to add my site to some of the higher ranking UK directories. Blog and forum spam isn't for me though. The odd productive comment here and there maybe but I don't have the time to do a lot and personally I hate having to plough through that when I am online so posting it myself seems hypocritical.
I would +1 on what Nigel wrote. SEO Moz is absolutely the best place and not just the main blog, but also YouMoz, the user generated content blog. It requires more time to learn and perhaps it's not "quick" gains, but they are solid and long-term ones. Stupid stuff done for short term gain will come back to haunt you. Just look at all the idiots on forums crying about Google, saying how awful they are, due to their spamtastic sites falling hard after Panda and Penguin. What did they expect? Google has always published its guidelines. If you don't like them, then don't rely on Google for traffic. (Well, in general, don't rely upon just Google anyway.) You also need to understand Google Updates. Keeping up with these, understanding past ones, and being very selective about which SEO blogs you trust will help to keep you out of trouble (as well as SEO Moz, I would recommend Search Engine Land as they cover the Google Updates much better). Advice such as "for the new google update, i suggest Keyword Variation." might sound good, but this guy obviously doesn't pay attention to updates such as focusing on keyword relevance (you get all this information directly from Google in their list of updates, seems to be released once every two months now). So when advising to vary keywords, you need to keep close to the original meaning, otherwise it's a spam flag. And really hasn't paid much attention to the updates in generally, because really this whole "manipulate Google" is contrary to what Google's now trying to do. It's refocusing webmasters on making quality content (or should be, if they took the effort to understand what Google's doing). Good luck!
I think one of the best ways is article submission to other websites or blogs that refer to your business. But the articles have to be genuine and in good quality. It takes some time and then you'll see the result.
If you don't have any money you better start writing. You can set up free sites all over the place with articles that link to your site. You can start as many Facebook pages as you want. You can send out your RSS feed to feed agragators. There are still a lot of free classified ads sites out there. I think you can still buy and ad on ebay classifieds for $10 per month. Craigs list. Twitter Google + You could advertise in your sig file on the Warrior forum.
Free website - quick content, but relevant - facebook pages, twitter account, get followers, social media launch to get visitors, competitions etc... take it slow - if you rush you'll get caught out.
Very first try with Social Networking..like Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest..and slowly build links, add high quality content in your website.