I'm really a beginner at SEO, I've taken the last 4 months or so and read thousands of blogs entries + many e-books on the subject so I have a good rudimentary knowledge. I have been somewhat successful so far (at least in yahoo and msn), and since I've entered the top 100 on many key phrases I hope rankings in google will soon follow. I've been creating link bait and contextual links on high pr sites (especially blogs). Most of my new links have been paid. Thats in addition to generally optimizing my sites. I'm wondering what else I should do. I think I've done just about everything I can do as far as seo (think). Really I think I should get a host/domain and begin testing strategies on it as far as link building, ranking etc. That way I can get a better idea of what really works. I guess I could just do the same thing for a sub-domain though. Anyhow after link building and onpage optimization what should i look to do?
What exactly have you done for linking? I see Link Bait (which is debatable, because most don't really understand it), link purchases and blog links. Are those the only 3 methods you've been using?
keep building your website. Wait. Keep up with the blogs. keep building your website. Wait. post in relevant forums. Wait. [Repeat] I hope you got the point. Unless you make a living as an expert SEO, I would not worry too much about fine tuning your SEO beyond the basics. Do keep up on your literature, but building the website and creating a solid user base should really be your main focus.
I'm doing articles on article sites with contextual links back to my site. Blog posts with contextual links. Contacting other websites my niche which i generally find by checking my top competitor's back links. I grabbed one sitewide last month and another this month, not sure if I'll continue doing that. As for link bait I've been working on creating tools (calculators to be exact) which are accompanied by articles providing more information. The calculators are new and interesting, and will be portable to other people's websites. I haven't really done much posting in relevent forums I could do some of that.. I am being paid a monthly salary for SEO and doing it for 40 hours a week. Read that the other day (seo book is one of the blogs I read of course! ) I forgot to mention some of the links I'm getting are deep links, and i'd expect the link bait to bring a lot more deep links.