What should I get my assistant to do? (SEO wise, no real results!)

[ketlad]

We own a video search site like casttv.com, now there is not much 'content' we can develop. I want to rank high for certain video names for Google.

In terms of seo, i have told our assistant (seo guy now) to basically find all sites on the net related to videos and collect their about us and contact them, and see if we can build any sort of partnership and also to post a new interesting article a day for our blog... He has contacted 500 sites of which we were able to get good links from 5 of them (1 way). He has exhausted his search of quality 'video' sites, now what? what can I have him do so we can actually start ranking, we have 100k pages indexed of which we have around 1million.

Only the top pages are allowed to be indexed, in terms of off page seo, what can I have our seo guy do all day now? should I fire him ($3k a month) and get a PR firm to try to get us into newspapers instead?

[Ecreativeworks]

Honestly, if  SEO is important to your business I think you may want to hire a SEO, rather than trying to have your assistant do it. I don't mean to sound harsh, but that could be your first failure point.

Ultimately the first step in linkbuilding is to answer the question "Why should a site link to you, and not any other equivalent sites?"

This is where the content creation comes from -- giving people a reason to link to you, a reason you're site is unique and awesome, authoritative or entertaining or whatever makes you stand apart. Then you do your outreach. If you got step 1 down, you should get a lot more than 1 out of every 100 related sites to link to you.

[ketlad]

ok casttv.com is not a good example. think of it as a content site for video, perhaps think ebaumsworld.com

[donford]

HI Ketlad,

I'm not 100% sure on your model, but it seems pretty much like a Huffington Post, which is take others content and regurgitate it? If so Egol has a point to a degree which is, you're dealing with big names and little control over what content is generated. If Hulu or Youtube post a video sure you may have a page for it, but if somebody is already at their site why would they go to yours to watch it?

I understand there are a crap ton of video sites, most of which I personally would never visit unless they had something nobody else had and I was pointed to the site by another person. That said, it should provide some insight as to what you can do. Try to understand why people go to these types of sites and what you can do to fill those desires. Additionally getting the word out about your site can be done by visiting forums and blogs and posting (not spamming) links to videos that may interest the community you are engaging with. Granted 3k to post links on a forums and blogs per month sounds like a lot but if your assistant uses the correct approach it could certainly bring traffic.

If you have the resources, skills and knowledge to understand why people use X site, and you can fulfill those desires and even make it better then you could do really well. You may have to take things to the next level, maybe a virtual museum that a person can design, and take people on tours of their favorite videos.. I know few sites are doing this with Pictures now, surely videos would be better. Anything you can do to put some power in the users hands give them control over what they see how they see it, and what they can do with it, would be a plus.

That is just my thoughts I hope it helps.

[ketlad]

thanks

[EGOL]

Being absolutely honest... and this is only my opinion...

I think that you have a business model where you don't have enough resources to be competitive against other similar sites who have invested $10 million or more and have a ten year head start.  So give the assistant ten weeks pay and let him use the time to find a new job.