The best way to spend 4 hours/day on offsite SEO?

[GreenHatWeb]

I have an assistant who is able to do 4 hrs of SEO work for me every day. I don't have much onsite SEO work for him to do, and he's not skilled for social media management, so I'm thinking the best thing to have him do is manual link building.

So far I've had him create a spreadsheet of more than 1,000 blogs and directories that relate to the subject matter of our websites, and had him include the domain authority of each and if they use the "nofollow" attribute on their links.

Next I will have him start adding comments/submissions that include links back to our sites, starting with the highest DA sties and ones without the "nofollow" attributes.

Do you agree this is the best way to have him spend his time? Are there other tasks you would highly recommend?

Ryan

[GreenHatWeb]

Thanks, Moosa!

[MoosaHemani]

Here you go! >> http://www.seomoz.org/directories

[GreenHatWeb]

I do have a paid membership, but I don't know where the list of directories is. Can you tell me?

Also, isn't looking at the domain authority of a directory a good way to tell if it's good?

[MoosaHemani]

BIG question Ryan, but if I cut all the crap the result would be something like this…

Some directories are really good while others are really bad so if you really know what good directories are go for it but if you don’t then don’t do the wild guess kind of a thing or judge the quality by the website’s layout!

SEOmoz have bunch of good directories in their list so you can go though the full list within your paid SEOmoz account see if you can go with those….

[GreenHatWeb]

Thank you very much. I found your answers really helpful, Moosa and Alice. I definitely understand your advice not to engage in spammy link building on blogs. But what about directories?

There are a bunch of directories out there -- some free, some quite expensive. Is submitting our websites to all of those directories considered spammy by penguin? Can submission to some directories by harmful? How do we know which ones are good?

Ryan

[EGOL]

I would spend $1000 to have a local photographer coach your employee on taking great photos for your website.  Then with advice from photographer spend $1000 on a good digital camera.

Then set the employee to work taking great photos for your website.

After that I would get graphics program coaching and a graphics program.

[gcdtechnologies]

Hi Ryan, I agree with Moosa here. Thoughtful and valuable comment posting can help you to gain authority among niche audiences, but adding your URL before you've earned this authority is quite spammy and might get you penalised by Google. If I had an extra four hours a day for SEO, I would spend:

• 30 minutes - Commenting and interacting with influential bloggers and communities in my niche
• 30 minutes - Keyword/trend research
• 2 hours - Content creation around these trends and keywords
• 1 hour - Promoting that content and managing social media profiles. Even if your assistant isn't skilled is social media management, it shouldn't take too long to get him up to speed.

Content creation and promotion is the best and most sustainable way to earn links, if that's what your primarily concerned about.

Good luck!

[MoosaHemani]

I think this is one of the best ways to get your website kicked hard by penguin... To be really honest i can say NO to your idea!

I guess if a guy can work for you 4 hours a day and you want him to do quality link building for you then you should tell him to find link opportunities for you instead of blogs and forums that offer do follow link...

• Tell him to find the website that allow guest posting and are related to your niche.
• Tell him to find websites that are link to broken links of any of the website
• Tell him to email them and request links from them
• Tell him to search the image that you are using on your website to see who else are using it to ask link from them...

And this way you will be able to build a legitimate link profile instead of spammy link building that usually starts with do follow blog commenting...