Long-term SEO strategy, please help.

Hey DP friends! I need advice... and I also think this would be a good point of discussion.

My company has been doing web design for three years now and I am branching out into Internet marketing. Offpage SEO is one service which I have provided, but I hope to make it one of my key services, so I need to rethink it.

I have been outsourcing the link building to another company and use the following methods:

• Blog commenting on PR3 + pages. There comments are semi-relevant, but not great, and they post on some obvious link farms / foreign language sites.
• Article writing/posting (this is of decent quality)
• Forum posting

They have provided some results for my clients no doubt, but I worry that this is not sustainable as SEO regulations change and as they are building links that a large portion of will be removed. (though the company insists these are the best and most effective methods)

The companies I work for are not fly-by-night sites/companies, they are small-medium local businesses whose reputation is important and understand that long-term results out weight short term gains.

So please help me with some advice....
do I need to change what I am doing for offpage SEO?
Is blog commenting something that could get Google penalties on a domain?
Are there other methods of link building that I should look into?
Or anything else with you think is pertinent.

Again, I am thinking long-term for my clients and myself as I am sure many DP members do as well.

 

you can also tell bloggers to blog about your website where they will link to your site.

 

Your long term goals should include organic traffic and good content.

 

I am referring to link-building strategies only, I understand the need for good content.

 

Give more emphasis on Directory Submission if you really wanna have a good and healthy organic traffic.

 

Is it really worth to do so? Can you please give some useful insight how to properly use them?

 

Your link building strategy is not very sound... They might give you early results, but as you said, they won't be very stable and long lasting results.

All your strategies are old school strategies. Dig out some more effective techniques.

For me, blogging is the most successful strategy and this is why I am a huge fan of blogging, guest blogging and blog commenting.
As far as blog commenting is concerned, many people find it hard to dig out niche related dofollow blogs. For this purpose I use a tool called ‘Keyword Country’ for find celebrity blogs of my niche that accept blog commenting for backlinking.

 

Consider using services such as prweb(dot)com or onlineprnews(dot)com to create a press release for your website. It can be a few paragraphs, or as fancy as you want with video, slideshows, images, etc. Your site may be of interest to niche bloggers who distribute content in your industry. And press release services have the potential of getting you thousands of backlinks, because press releases get syndicated to thousands of websites.

 

Thanks for the tips. C.Rebecca, when you talk about blogging, do you mean blogging on internal pages, or creating a seperate domain that is a blog? .. .or anyone else that knows much about blogging for SEO?

 

Well as per your off page services these are the most essential things that you need to do a regular basis. First of all you need to optimize your keywords that are closely related to your site. Then you need to do this ff page submission. Besides that Social Media is one of the most influencing factor that can give your website traffic a great boost. So try to optimize it. Actually you can't predict the SEO tactics just for one purpose as it is cahnges every time. So try to update yourself as much as you can.

 

Are you really outsourcing your services from another company? Because these are just regular practices, and are not countable as a long term strategy. My advice for you would be to outsource from somewhere else, they could spoil you reputation among your clients.

Besides, C.Rebecca have mentioned some of very useful points.

 

I observed many site have their own blog section, reviews, discussions, shared experiences, latest news updates. By all this section your site may get good traffic, unique content, good ranking also.

 

Article marketing is a good long term strategy, because the articles stay online forever, and the chances of them being deleted are very slim.

I totally agree with C. Rebecca. For blog commenting and forum posting, make sure that they know what they are doing. If they are going to be linking from blogs that have penalty in the eyes of Google, or blogs that have poor content, that could backfire in the long run.

Press releases are great also.

 

Besides all these mentioned above, you could opt for guest blogging, contest holding or other link baiting ideas. That could really get you some good links.

 

I also agree with all you people. Thanks for the details.

 

Blog commenting is definitely a great way to go...even nofollow links seem to deliver a lot of my PR value:S

 

Blogging seems a one of the best way of link building as the sole intention of blogging is to share informative news to the folk, further there has lot more techniques developed in blogoshpere such as guest blogging and so on. Apart from blogging you can even concentrate on review of your business, Joining Question and answer group and even you can start forum for your business. The sole thing is to pretend that you are the authority in the niche and you can very well benefit from major search engines.

 

If you want long term effects, contextual links (or links from anchor texts embedded within articles) are links with the highest quality that you can give to any site. Thus, the most powerful would be article marketing, press releases and the use of blog networks. You can read more from The SEO Experts Academy course by Terry Kyle & Matt Carter. The Best SEO course out there...

 

Given the profile of your customers, I suggest you do a lot of local SEO - meaning putting them in Google maps, local directories and yellow pages, etc. Google clearly prefers local content, and you will rank stronger in the local searches.

 

If you want Long term results. By all means stay away from black hat seo!