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
-
How does lazy load effect SEO?
One of my clients implemented lazy load on part of the navigation and I am wondering what the effects will be. Specifically, the drop-down navigation does not load until you hover over it. That means when you look at the page source that drop down navigation is no longer there. I am wondering if that means the google bot no longer sees the links in the navigation drop down. I am looking into this because the dev department of this company is going to do what it wants to and they need proof that its a bad move. I already suspect that it is. Too early to tell what the effects will be and not sure if there is a built-in delay in the algorithm as to when it will impact rankings. Ultimately, I am wondering if my belief that if you can't see it in the page source then as far as that particular page goes it is not seen. That would be an important thing to verify as being true.
Web Design | | KentH0 -
URL Structure's Effect on SEO
Hello all, I have a client who currently has a very poor URL structure. As it stands, their URLs are formatted in the following manner: http://www.domain.com/category/subcategory/page In all my years of SEO, however, I have always tried to implement the following format: http://www.domain.com/category/page The web designer for this particular project has been very reluctant to change the structure for obvious reasons, but I'm convinced that by modifying the URL structure, SEO will improve. I am correct in thinking this? Likewise, if I am able to get the URL structure changed, what do I need to look out for to make sure we don't lose any traction for our keyword terms? Any and all insight/suggestions is greatly appreciated. Thanks for reading!
Web Design | | maxcarnage0 -
I want to create a 301 redirect on a WordPress site, nothing's working...
Hello all, I'm hoping someone out there can give me a hand with this. I'm trying to modify my .htaccess file so that the site will go from maxcarnagemusic.com to www.maxcarnagemusic.com and also, so viewers will be redirected to www.maxcarnagemusic.com/home when they try to access the site. I've tried a few different things, including adding the 301 redirect plugin for Wordpress, but nothing seems to work. Can someone out there show/tell me how to create an htaccess file that will execute as much. I apologize in advance, my Apache experience is very, very limited. Thank you all in advance!
Web Design | | maxcarnage0 -
/index.php/ What is its purpose and does it hurt SEO?
Hello Moz Forum, I am still in the process of cleaning up the lack of attention to detail and betrayal set by our soon to be ex-SEO company. You can see a previous question I ask regarding betrayal SEO. I am analyzing every page on our website and i am noticing this /index.php/ in most of our URLs. We want to leave our expression engine cms and convert to wordpress. I have been reading about index.php but most of it is over my head for now. What does concern me is the "layman's" findings i am seeing through analytics. Our main domain has two URLs. one that ends in .com and the other ends in .com/index.php/ The one that ends in .com has a higher page rank than the ladder. And there are other internal pages with the same two variations. Can someone please explain to me what is /index.php/ ? what are the benefits of it? what are the cons? What will happen to my site once we move to wordpress? As always, your comments and suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Web Design | | CamiloSC0 -
Would iFrames From a Beta3 Help the SEO Value of Domain?
What I understand as of now: Google does crawl iframes, but attributes the SEO value of the content within them to their original site. (Let me know if I'm mistaken.) What I need to know: If I were to iframe a section of a beta3.domainname.com site into a domainname.com site, does this beta3 attribute any SEO value to the domainname.com site? Essentially - Does good content on a from a beta3.domainname.com (which is mainly just a naked piece of content) bring any benefit to the domainname.com version of the site when it is iframed into the domainname.com site?
Web Design | | SmokewagonKen0 -
Any reaction to the announcement from Google that 'signed in' searches won't pass through search query info to analytics?
Seems like SEO is about to get that much harder: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/10/making-search-more-secure-accessing.html Any thoughts on this?
Web Design | | PaulM011 -
How much content is too much? Best Pages For Content?
To my understanding content has a lot to do with organic rankings if written correctly. My question is, how much content is too much and what pages are best to place content. Our company sells very costly products. Our customers call to purchase, we do not have an eCommerce site. Write now we have on average 350 words per page. We have about 200+ pages. Each page is written for that general category and each product has its own unique content. It seems to me that the pages with less content, tend to rank a bit better. As we are in the process of redoing our website, is there any recommendations on writing content, or adjusting the amount of text. I am thinking a lot of our text is informative only to a certain extent. Would writing content just for the main category page be better, and then on the actual product page, have only about 250 words as a description? Are there any other recommendations for SEO that are fairly new? Besides the Title, Description, Heading Tags, Image Alts, URLS etc.
Web Design | | hfranz0 -
How WP Themes work with Navigation Structure for SEO and JQuery Headers?
I am trying to find the best WP Theme for our company. I noticed most of them do not offer a left hand side navigation on the home pages, and usually are on the right side on the inside pages. I always thought that Home Page links were very important for SEO. Currenly we have a left drop down navigation with all of our product catagories, keyword optimized. The structure follows for all the pages. Is this not as important to Search Engines anymore? Is it better to have a products link, to all the products and then the inside pages, have just a navigation bar, for that particular catagory? This seems to be very common on all the templates i am seeing. I also noticed, and really like the JQueary Tabs. I would use this for displaying, PDFs and Specifications Charts. Also, some home page images are using a jquery slider with some text, linking to a page. Is Jquery the new javascript and do search engines see what is in the code? I also noticed they all have footers that have links and some other information. Is this a SEO must have?
Web Design | | hfranz0