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SEO Triage - What matters most?
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If you only had 8 hours to work on an SEO project...
How would you spend your time to get the fastest results?
On-page optimization, or link-building?
Context:
On-Page Optimization: "A" grade (SEOMOZ On-Page Report Card)
Keywords: "moderately competitive" (SEOMOZ Keyword Difficulty Tool)
Domain Authority: 33 (SEOMOZ Competitive Link Analysis)
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Thank you everyone! Appreciate the focused advice and insights.
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If it is a small local business I'd definitely invest a few of those hours in getting local profiles set up. Taking the time to do consistent, quality listings can prove invaluable for a local business. Here is a great list of local business directories:
http://websuccessdiva.com/blog/local-business-directories/
Other than that I agree with Ryan that project mapping is very important. But that is assuming you will eventually have more than 8 hours to work on the project.
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I would check the quality of the content (human readability and usefulness) and then, so long as all is good with the on-page SEO as you say it is, I would ensure I have social bookmarking buttons in prominant places, and open accounts on the major social sites (twitter, Facebook etc) and try to make it as easy as possible for folks to bookmark the content.
I would spend just 30mins initially following a few people that appear interested in the industry.
Then:
If it is an ecommerce site, take a feed from the mysql database, and modify it for Google Base (quick once you know how). If the site used an open source shopping cart/CMS, then there is likely a plugin/modification for free or cheap to do this instead of going into the database directly, as so this could be automated.
Also if it is an ecommerce store, I would ensure the h1's are showing correctly on every product page, and that there is GREAT (and I mean GREAT) navigation throughout the site (in fact, this goes for most sites, not just Ecommerce ones).
If it is a site that's based on a blogging platform (wordpress etc) then I would check the RSS feeds, and submit them to decent RSS sites, to aid indexing.
Follow that by looking for some guest post availability, write and submit a decent press release about the new site launch (be sure to submit to Google News sources!) and finish off by doing an hours extra work over a coffee, drawing up some flow diagrams of the next steps. Part of this final step would be working out how much time I could realistically spend each week or month on tasks for this website.
Phew, that's a fair bit for 8 hrs, but it is realistic if you get your head down, and keep the coffee flowing.
I hope this helps, but I bet some guys and gals will disagree with what I have said! Still, each to their own!
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On-page optimization, or link-building?
If this is a content site.... neither.... Spend the time to make social sharing very easy. Any left-over time trying to get links from hub sites in that niche.
If this is a retail site... would go for links from the easy industry and community resource sites.
For both sites would ask for 8 more hours to brainstorm highly linkable content that the site owners will produce.
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If I was only giving 8 hours I'd spend it all on project mapping. The work a site requires to be effective is way more than 8 hours but you could construct a broad project road map that would lead you consistently in the right direction for a year or more.
With the above context I'd be working on increasing domain authority and auditing site architecture to get the most bang for the buck. Steve's suggestions are spot on.
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A bit of each if you're limited like that... if you've already got the A grade for the keywords then I'd focus on link building mostly. Maybe an hour on the on-page (as long as your content is right already) and the other seven on links?
You'll still need to do more later though.
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