Hi, I spend far too much on Adwords so in a bid to reduce my costs, I'm going to take on the SEO myself. The forum is hopefully going to be a valuable tool for me, but I just want to run my basic plan by you to make sure I'm not starting out all wrong. Our site is a "package" shop. I don't have the access to modify pages that much. I can modify the content of a page, but not the basic layout. With this in mind, I was thining of going firstly for the backlinks approach. We have hundreds of keywords that we're PPC'ing at the moment. I was going to identify 5 phrases to start with by looking at the highest number of impressions for a period. This will give me 5 phrases/keywords to target and get high up in the natural listings. Hopeully I'll be able to get us in the first page in the natural listings then will be able to stop paying per click. Sound ok? It's a daunting task for me, I'm not sure yet where to begin but wanted to run this by someone! Thanks in advance.
Sounds like a plan. Apart from building links, which I see you're doing with your signature, do some on-page SEO as well (search for the exact techniques).
This is an alright plan. Kind of going backwards from how normal businesses do online marketing. What I would do it is establish a keyword plan/strategy. What keywords have competitive search volume, decent competition and the absolute most relevance to your website/webpages? (last one helps big in ranking) Optimize accordingly. Do you at least have access to title tags? If not, SEO will not work for you unless you get some serious backlinks.
Thanks I can edit header and title tags, just not change the layout. I'm just not really sure what I'm doing yet! Will work on the onpage seo, get all my tags in place then hit the backlinks. How many should I go for? Is there such a thing as too many? I see services offering 20k+, are these a good idea? I've looked at TNX in the past, not sure if it's ideal or not but it seemed to generate a lot of links Edit: A silly question, is medals a different search term to medal or should I just use medal? (just an example) Thanks!
In link building, quality is always better than quantity. Do extensive research before putting your money in links. Read reviews, ask around, etc. Google's getting better at catching paid links. I usually go for plural keywords. They are different, but not entirely. Sometimes results will be the same, other times slightly different.
You want to optimize the content on your pages first. I would not worry about the layout as much as having a high word count, relevant terms and related terms to the keywords you want to rank. Once you are absolutely sure that their is enough content spread out through your website to target all of your desired keywords, then begin to backlink.