If you had someone working for you for $10-12 an hour, what would you have him or her do?

[Ralzaider]

I was recently promoted to director of marketing for a small business that focuses primarily with online e-commerce sales. I need help assigning someone who makes $10-12 dollars an hour.

If you were assigning this person to do SEO work, what would you have them do? Note that this person does not have any previous internet marketing knowledge, but they are a college graduate and can read in write in perfect English.

[KaneJamison]

+1 for everything Sha said - no indexed page on your site should be without a paragraph or more of original content, especially if that page's purpose is to aggregate product listings.

In terms of on-site optimization this is likely the best use of that employee's time aside from blog or other content creation.

[ShaMenz]

Hi Ralzaider,

Some great recommendations & info here already, especially from Kane, but just wanted to add:

When I hear "online ecommerce sales" I start worrying about duplicated product descriptions fed from manufacturers.

So, if this is an issue for your site, I would put your person to work on writing interesting unique product descriptions for every item in your online catalog. Since you are lucky enough to be paying a tiny hourly rate for their services, I would even consider an investment in product to give to them as samples so that they can actually see, touch and feel the products, try them out etc before writing about them. If you have hundreds or thousands of products, perhaps just identify the most important ones to provide as samples.

If unique content isn't an issue for your site, then I would go with the other recommendations in this thread first.

Hope that helps,

Sha

[icecarats]

Have them write educational articles about the products/categories. For example if you were selling android tablets maybe a write up on what the difference between OS 2.2, 3.0, 4.0 etc. Ever since farmer/panda I've been seeing content heavy pages with low link ratios shoot up the rankings. I've even seen it first hand in some pretty tight categories where we'll publish an informational page and then the day it gets indexed it becomes the number one result. Obviously you'd need an internal link structure that can pass juice to/from these pages as well (e.g. linked to the product/category its describing).

[KaneJamison]

College grad with perfect English?

1 - Show them how to run a CSV of a competitor's websites in Open Site Explorer (also Blekko and Majestic SEO are worth considering)

2 - Open the CSV in Excel, sort the entries by domain authority and then by domain name, and have them start color categorizing each row by the following (you'll have to hold their hand for a bit):

• (A) we already have a link from this domain
• (B) we don't have a link but I submitted our info
• (C) we don't have a link but maybe we can get one or it will take work (like a guest post or building a relationship or sending an email request) - in another column have them categorize what type of link it is (sidebar / resources / guest post / ad / etc )
• (D) we can't get a link from this domain (other sites owned by the competitor, etc.)

3 - Tell them not to bother with any site with domain authority under 20 or 10 or whatever your personal cutoff is.

4 - If they can get the link automatically, like submitting to a directory, have them do it. Quick them a run through on best practices for things like URL, phone numbers, and how to vary the descriptions, and then have them use some sort of auto-fill extension or plug-in so they're not retyping the same thing over and over.

5 - Have them transfer any links from category (C) to a new spreadsheet, which will be what they work on after the categorizing is done. The spreadsheet should be sorted by type - guest post, resources link, ad, etc.

6 - After a  few weeks (or a month or two) of that, they'll appreciate the value of creating awesome content and getting people to create the links for you, and they'll have an excellent idea of the types of link building your competitors are engaged in.

Their next project should be learning how to approach each link from the new spreadsheet they created in step 5, which you'll need to teach them a little bit. Have them start with writing guest posts and contacting guest post sites under your supervision. Then they can advance up to email requests and relationship building after they've done a bit of guest posting. That should keep them busy for 4 to 12 months depending on your niche.

[donford]

Free Links (link building), forums, blogs, community related sites to your industry. Just be sure the person is NOT spamming, there is a certain finesse to post links on forums & blogs that is required.

On Page Analysis get a list of your top X pages and have them run reports on each one, save to PDF.

Familiarizing their-selves with this site & its articles.

Link building is a never ending process, but we try to just get a couple decent links per week now...... when I first started my day consisted mostly of link building.

And if you're in sales I'm sure you have some personal or company content that could be proof read, or generated.