Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I've been digging my teeth into SEO for a solid 1.5 weeks or so now and I've learned a tremendous amount.  However, I realize I have only scratched the surface still.

One of the hardest things I've struggled with is the sheer amount of information and feeling overwhelmed.  I finally think I've found a decent path.  Please critique and offer input, it would be much appreciated.

Step One:  Site Architecture

I run an online proofreading & editing service.  That being said, there are lots of different segment we would eventually like to rank for other than the catch-all phrases like 'proofreading service'.  For example, 'essay editing', 'resume editing', 'book editing', or even 'law school personal statement editing'.

I feel that my first step is to understand how my site is built to handle this plan now, and into the future.  Right now we simply have the homepage and one segment: kibin.com/essay-editing.  Eventually, we will have a services page that serves almost like a site-map, showing all of our different services and linking to them.

Step Two:  Page Anatomy

I know it is important to have a well defined anatomy to these services pages.  For example, we've done a decent job with 'above the fold' content, but now understand the importance of putting the same type of care in below the fold.

The plan here is to have a section for recent blog posts that pertain to that subject in a section titled "Essay Editing and Essay Writing Tips & Advice", or something to that effect.  Also including some social sharing options, other resources, and an 'about us' section to assist with keyword optimization is in the plan.

Step Three:  Page Optimization

Once we're done with Step Two, I feel that we'll finally be ready to truly optimize each of our pages.  We've down some of this already, but probably less than 50%.  You can see evidence of this on our essay editing page and proofreading rates page.  So, the goal here is to find the most relevant keywords for each page and optimize for those to the point we have A grades on our on-page optimization reports.

Step Four:  Content/Passive Link Building

The bones for our content strategy is in place.  We have sharing links on blog posts already in place and a slight social media presence already.  I admit, the blog needs some tightening up, and we can do a lot more on our social channels.  However, I feel we need to start by creating content that our audience is interested in and interacting with them on a consistent basis.

I do not feel like I should be chasing link building strategies or guest blog posts at this time.  PLEASE correct me if I'm off base here, but only after reading step five:

Step Five:  Active Link Building

My bias is to get some solid months of creating content and building a good social media presence where people are obviously interacting with our posts and sharing our content.

My reasoning is that it will make it much easier for me to reach out to bloggers for guest posts as we'll be much more reputable after spending time doing step 4.   Is this poor thinking?  Should I try to get some guest blog posts in during step 4 instead?

Step Six:  Test, Measure, Refine

I'll admit, I have yet to really dive into learning about the different ways to measure our SEO efforts.  Besides being set up with our first campaign as an SEOPro Member and having 100 or so keywords and phrases we're tracking... I'm really not sure what else to do at this point.  However, I feel we'll be able to measure the popularity of each blog post by number of comments, shares, new links, etc. once I reach step 6.

Is there something vital I'm missing or have forgotten here?  I'm sorry for the long winded post, but I'm trying to get my thoughts straight before we start cranking on this plan.

Thank you so much!

Anjon,

Thanks for the link.  I've been working my way through the whiteboard Fridays but hadn't gotten to this one yet.

I just watched it and won't be submitting any articles to the site, thanks!

Stephen,

Thanks for the reply (and the typo fix).

Honestly, I planned on starting with some 'softball' content... stuff that I feel we can write about and our current users will appreciate and read.  However, I understand this is not content that will probably garner a lot of links.  The point of this would be to develop a discipline and a streamlined system while moving toward better in-depth content.

I understand that the better the content, the easier it is to get external links.  But I do feel it's important to start showing some sort of presence on our blog and getting in the habit of writing.

For example, we can easily write about the pitfalls of people's personal statements.  We see and edit a lot of them, however, to me this isn't really juicy and hugely linkable content.

On the other hand, I am planning a pretty interesting piece.  I want to take 100 blog posts from each of the 5 top tech blogs and have them run through our editing network, analyze them to see how many error, typos, etc. they have and then publish our findings in an info graphic and even see if there's a correlation to the number of errors and their traffic numbers.  To me, this is juicy, linkable, grand slam content.  Obviously it isn't easy to create something like that every day or even every week.