How is an SEO's time best used?
-
We have over 50 highly varied and niche sites in our company. Each website is for an annual event spread across the calendar.
I am the solo SEO person here and was wondering what your opinions are about what would bring in the greatest SEO power in my limited daily allotment; link building? Keywords? Content?
Oh, and to make my life even easier - its all based on SharePoint 2007!
-
EGOl - again, you have really helped!
You definitely are an SEO Guru!!
-
Since you are ranking well already. I would think that the linkbuilding is not "urgent" - especially if the people doing the searching are highly interested in the event and are likely to visit more than one website.
My first priority then would be to define what content should be on these sites? What is "the minimum"? What would be "ideal"? And, what would be "kickass"?
Once I have that I would get "minimum" on every site then start to get "ideal" everywhere. Only then would I try to get links if the links that I am trying to get are given on merit.
I would try to get "kickass" content on the sites that are most important or the ones that face heavy competition.
-
EGOL - thanks again for all of the help. To answer your questions;
The search volume isn't very high - maybe globally in the thousands according to SEOMoz's Keyword Difficulty Tool.
We rank high generally in the SERPs for the important terms.
From all of the answers here, and obviously knowing how things work in my company, I'm leaning heavily towards focusing my energies on link building with a secondary focus on creating new content.
-
Is there genuine search volume for these events and if there is how do you rank in the SERPs for the important terms?
-
Thanks EGOL for your answer.
We have:
little content, (I am working on fixing that)
few competitors in this, an exceptionally niche market
some inbound links from .edu and .gov sites but nothing astonishing
Basically I can only do actions to all or none of the sites as they theoretically receive the same level of attention from me.
-
Thanks for the help Asim!
Luckily our keywords are quite niche but content is difficult to get hold of because of this speciality. I'm going with linkbuilding and social media on this one!
-
I agree, before you do anything it's best to take some time and asses your current metrics, statistics, rankings, etc in order to determine where your most time should be spent on SEO.
-
First, spend some time auditing technical aspects. Be sure you're not "getting in your own way" by doing something technically unsound (duplicating page titles, robots.txt problems, etc).
I also suggest dedicating a majority of resources to content. It would be helpful to know a little more about the nature of your sites.
After content, I would dedicate the remaining resources to link building in the form of getting your best content in front of the right audiences. That's your most efficient shot at acquiring new links, shares, etc.
-
If I was going to allocate company resources in response to an answer to this question I would want that answer to be based upon good and complete information. Needed for a good answer is an evaluation of your content, evaluation of your competitive position, evaluation of your inbound links, evaluation of your current SEO and more.
Any answer that is given without these evaluations is a guess and could direct you to spend time/money where it will not be effective. Also, the answer will probably not be the same for each of your sites.
So, instead of giving you an answer that could be really wrong my advice would be to hire someone who can spend the time needed to provide a good and competent answer.
-
I would focus on creating a stream of unique valuable content on your website, the reason why I say content is because of the following:
- More Content on website helps increase Domain Authority (Links to a better job of this)
- Good Content can be linkworthy (acquire links organically)
- More content gives your website more opportunities to gain the longtail search traffic
Obviously try to use your ideal "keywords" that will convert your traffic into customers or leads for whatever you are selling or promoting.
Depending on how much time you really have for SEO, Linkbuilding should be a priority, without links you are not going to gain the ranking and traffic you would want to have.
So here is how I would rank your priorities for SEO:
- Keywords
- Content
- Linkbuilding/Social Media
Hope this helps
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What Website Platform would you use?
We are considering 1 maybe 3 websites (1 new 2 redesign) there are so many options with technology rolling over every 3 years it seems. Here are my obstacles: Wordpress: dynamic but easily hacked, often needs updating Joomla: attractive, but cumbersome to manage Custom: sleek and easier to manage, but gets outdated quickly Here are some variables: 80+ products, E-Commerce, Dynamic, Blog, Tons of images, SEO friendly, MUST not lose our rankings! OK, Moz friends, What do you recommend?
Web Design | | KevnJr0 -
Are photoshelters templates SEO friendly?
trying to figure out if photoshelters templates are SEO friendly. We are debating using photoshelter (already an image hosting partner we're using) and Wordpress. Any input much appreciated!
Web Design | | Majsan0 -
We're considering making notable changes to our website's navigation. Other than 301 redirects from old pages to new, what do I need to consider with this type of move or update?
We would like to make some navigation changes to our website: www.NetGainIT.com, specifically to the services section. I know that I will need a list of 301 redirects if I do not plan on keeping certain pages, but what else do I need to consider?
Web Design | | NetGainTech0 -
SEO Tips for Affiliate Website
Hi all , I would just like to have an expert Opinion on SEO for Affiliate Website . Basically if I list all Third party products (Amazon/Affilate Window etc ) on my website and then the customer will be redirected to the Affiliates website to make a Purchase will there be an issue with SEO (Lots of Outgoing Url's) and Will the website not rank for Important keywords or will it be hit by any penalty ? I heard it's not good for SEO , any work around this ? If this is case How come cashback Sites rank well with no issues , although the concept is basically the same ? Any Tips or Advice appreciated as how to get this done safe . My Preferred Option would be with Magento Shopping Cart or second option would be with Wordpress Cart only in case this provides some SEO benefits over Magento by some plugins .
Web Design | | Aus0070 -
The impact of using directories without target keyword on our Rankings
Hello all, I have a question regarding a website I am working on. I’ve read a lot of Q en A’s but couldn’t really find the best answer. For one of our new websites we are thinking about the structure of this website and the corresponding URL-structure. Basically we have a main product (and a few main keywords) which should drive the most traffic to our website, and for which we want to optimize our homepage. Besides those main keywords, we have an enormous base of long-tail keywords from which we would like to generate traffic. This means we want to create a lot of specific pages which are optimized. My main question is the following: We are thinking of two options: Option 1: www.example.com/example-keyword-one Option 2: www.example.com/directory/example-keyword-one With option 1 we will link directly from our homepage to the most important pages (which represent our most important keywords). All the pages with the long tail content will be linked from another section on our website, which is one click away from our homepage (specifically a /solutions page which is linked from the footer). All the pages with long-tail content will have this structure www.example.com/example-keyword-one so the URLs will not contain the directory /solutions With option 2 we will use more subdirectories in our URLs. Specifically, for all the long tail content we would use URLs like this: www.example.com/solutions/example-keyword-one
Web Design | | NielsB
The directories we want to use wouldn't really have added value in terms of SEO, since they don’t represent important keywords. So what is the best way to go? Option 1, straightforward, short URL’s which don’t really represent the linking structure of our website, but only contain important keywords. Or option 2, choose for more directories in our URLs which represent the linking structure of our website, but contain directories which don’t represent important keywords. Would the keyword ‘solutions’ in the directory (which doesn’t really relate to the content on the page) have a negative impact on our rankings for that URL?0 -
What seo benefit does setting up a photo gallery where each photo is a separate web page?
what seo benefit does setting up a photo gallery where each photo is a separate web page? My old SEO guy set up my photo gallery like that claiming that because each photo was a separate page, it added a big seo benefit and i never understood what he was talking about. Maybe alt text on the photo with key phrases in it pointing to my other pages to give my site a theme for google? I'm not really sure. He has since moved away and i am considering redoing the photo gallery to multiple images on one page to be more user friendly to my users. This photo gallery is 3 years old and the photos might have some page rank to them helping my site so i don't want to remove this gallery if there really is a benefit to it and it will hurt my site. I once removed four static page rank 3 pages from my site that weren't used for my site anymore and my rankings dropped 5 positions. Thoughts anyone? Thanks! Ron
Web Design | | Ron100 -
Seo and CSS media queries
Hello to all participants! I'm starting on responsive design with css media queries and I was wondering if hidding content can, in this case, can also be bad for seo? I know that hidding content is bad (eg. display: none;), but is it also like that with responsive design or does Google see it other way? If I have a news column with title, image and text for 1024px and hide the text and image leaving just the title for 768px, or smaller, will Google consider this black hat and will it be bad for seo? are there any articles I can read about this subject, and other similar subjects? sorry for my english 🙂 thanks
Web Design | | Lusodados1 -
Word Press Seo Errors/ Questions
Hi my name is Tina I am new here I hope you guys can help me out. I thought building my new site with Word Press was going to simplify things, however I have a ton of errors, and I am not sure what they are, or how to fix them. I am hoping someone could share with me a solution for these errors. I have 28 rel=canonical errors, I am not sure what this means, I understand it to mean my pages are similar, and this is to set a heirarchy between my pages. Please correct me if I am wrong. If I am correct would this be necessary to add if my main keyword was "widgets" and my home page was optimized for "widgets" and my next page was "blue widgets" and so on. While my pages are similar they are all optimized for different versions of my main keyword some using long tail keywords. Do you know of a plugin that can help solve this problem? Also does anyone have a plugin they recommend for G+ my G+ authorship verification is causing an error as well? I am using Head Space 2 I have used this seo plugin numerous times with great success it has been my favorite seo plugin. However, we have a portfolio that shows our clients websites, and on those pages Head Space will not let me enter a description tag. What plug in do you guys recommend with more control over each page? Another interesting issue is on one of our pages I optimized it for our Canadian clients, and now every page has been listed in Google.ca for the keywords it should have on Google.com. We are listed on Google maps, verified in Google places, and our address is on the site so they know we're from the USA however, the majority of our keywords are only listed in Google.ca. We're on page one for all of them, we are in the top three on most of them so that's not bad, but we want to be listed in Google.com as well. Any suggestions on this?
Web Design | | TinaGammon1