We are a small company selling copier equipment online. We have limited time and resources. We just finished rewriting our URLs to be more SEO friendly. We want to continue our SEO efforts, but want to make sure we use our resources wisely.
So, which of the following would have the biggest, most immediate SEO impact: better incorporating keywords into our product pages, writing original content, blog writing/guest submission, social bookmarking, SEO friendly filenames for images and use of alt attribute tag, inserting microdata (especially on product pages), social media, inserting meta descriptions?
Is there another SEO tactic that we should be considering?
I think it all will help. You said that you sell products online, right?
Then I would suggest you to do “business review” it will surely help your business through website. Other techniques for you-
Business listing
Local place listing
Classifieds… etc.
There’s a lot to learn about SEO and all of those things will help, I’m not so sure anyone can say definitively “yes this aspect will help you the most.”. If you can afford it, pay for an seo review, and they can give you a much better answer. If you don’t have the money, check out seomoz.org, and start reading.
better incorporating keywords into our product pages,
writing original content,
SEO friendly filenames for images and use of alt attribute tag
inserting meta descriptions
inserting microdata (especially on product pages)
blog writing/guest submission
Those above are called onpage optimization tactics, you do them on your website, 99% of all onpage tactics
matter almost none to your rankings!
The below are offpage factors related to getting backlinks, but they’re NOT good link building methods!
social bookmarking
social media,
Here’s why: social bookmarking and social media most of these sites use nofollow tag or require login to
see backlinks rendering backlinks you get from them useless totally.
Backlinks improve your rankings because they’re a recommendation from one website to you, an endorsement to Google by another website to yours!
Get as many backlinks as you can and use the keyword/s you want to rank for in anchor text (if you don’t do this backlinks are useless once again), don’t though use keyword/s all the time in anchor text, 30% of the time use something else like click here, visit my site, etc to make link profile look natural.
Wow, this response is really misguided. I hope nobody takes this advice and expects their website to do well in the long term.
Google wants to give their users the most relevant information on the internet and they are much more capable of determining relevance and authority based on content than backlinks alone. Of course links are still important, but onsite content is the most important factor in SEO and has been since Panda rolled around.
In terms of backlinks, I would recommend using the name of the website as the main anchor text. Using keyword anchor text will throw up flags to Google because that used to be popular amongst spammers (and not many other people). I would be wary to use keyword anchor text in more than 20% of all posts. The rest should be your name, or your sites name, or “website”, or “click here”, or just the link. Appearing natural in link building is the only way to make sure that your site doesn’t get penalized.
While Google still gives sites different rankings for certain keywords, they are now more focused on granting authority in a niche to determine which keywords are relevant to the niche. If you want to rank for individual keywords, you need to become the foremost authority on the niche instead of trying to rank for those keywords.
This was very different 24 months ago, but now, 5 high quality guest posts are worth more than 50,000 forum profiles links, blog comments, link exchanges, link directory submissions (except major sites like DMOZ), etc. Anything that is/was heavily spammed (other than article directories when articles are unique) are pretty much worthless nowadays.
You should never use the terms “immediate” and “SEO” in the same sentence. SEO should be viewed as branding for Google, if it is done right, you should rank for more keywords every month and send more traffic every month, indefinitely.
Microdata would probably have the most immediate impact because it would give you more real estate for the pages you already have ranking.
You should always do a detailed keyword analysis before launching a site and aim certain pages around particular keywords. Make sure you do not cannibalize the pages by trying to make more than 1 rank for the same keyword. You should also always have unique, keyword specific urls, title tags, and meta descriptions for every page. These things are necessary for every SEO campaign, regardless of what you are trying to rank for.
Your SEO friendly file names should be targeted around keywords that users will be searching for when they look for images on Google Images. You should try to rank the image, not use the image to rank the page.
Writing unique content and continuing to write unique content onsite is also usually necessary for a successful SEO campaign. Writing posts for other sites and blogs is a very good strategy once you have content on your own site covered.
Social media and social bookmarking could be done in a way to send traffic, and if they are done right then they will spread the word about your site effectively enough that people will want to write about it and visit. This is the only way these things will truly come into play. It is more common to see people waste a lot of time on social media than to see someone run an effective campaign. I had to quit trying to promote on FB and now just stick to Twitter and passively promote FB by uploading blog posts automatically because I was not getting a good return out of my time investment.
I think you’re misguided since I seen pages rank first page with ZERO content, I ranked salesletters (1 page sites) too. Yes zero content means site has just one blank white page.
Could you provide an example of that? It’s pretty hard to believe. It may be that one or two sites have somehow managed to scam the system in this way, but alabamaseo is offering sound advice, which should be helpful to any site. And as he’s pointed out, Google is becoming wiser by the day to the tricks used to manipulate rankings, and techniques which have worked in the past are no longer effective.[/FONT]
The rule with anchor text I follow is 70% of the time use keyword in anchor text, 30% something else. If you use always your website URL you won’t rank anywhere but your website url.
Google ranks websites based on what others think (# of backlinks you have and other offpage factors), backlinks are a recommendation from one website to another, so that’s why a blank site can rank still as long as others recommend it (it has backlinks).
Not saying build blank or crap sites because probably sooner or later you’ll loose rankings and maybe other negative effects, but it’s just to show a point.
You can make your point without quoting me each time After all I’m not the only one who knows offpage factors are more important than onpage, I’m sure you know that.
So as with all things, moderation is the key. Yes, certainly, build links - they’re a vital part of the Web - but don’t do it simply with the aim of manipulating SERPs, because that approach no longer works.[/FONT]
That’s something that may have been true in the past (eg Google Bombs where a page was targeted with lots of incoming links using the same keywords, which weren’t featured on the page itself), but these were killed off with a Google update a few years back. I’m not aware of any evidence that this tactic is still working, unless you can suggest any yourself.
[ot]
A minor point of forum etiquette, but we would prefer that people do quote the message that they are replying to, as it makes it much easier to follow the discussion.[/ot][/font]
All of the things you have listed probably won’t help you that much in the long term. Most of them are just good practice and should be adhered to regardless of any SEO gain.
If you sell copier equipment why would you want to get involved in social media or blogging? Could you write enough content about copier equipment to gain a following? Would people want to follow a company that sells copier equipment?
It’s often forgotten that “Time == Money”, and if you are a company that time may as well be spent on advertising or marketing your business, rather than SEO.
SEO has changed. It is all about AUTHORITY and VALUE now. The old keyword sniping and stuffing shenanigans have worn thin and might finally be phased out in the future. If you play by the old rules, you are playing to lose. Try the following NEW approach (not really new since QUALITY is not a new concept)
List out all the copier models you cover
Using a keyword selector tool (Google’s adwords tool is good but there are others), figure out which ones get a) decent search volume AND b) little competition from other pages
Find Twitter or forum discussions about those models
Figure out people’s actual concerns about those models from blogs, twitter, facebook pages, forums, etc
Write an END ALL and BE ALL guide to the models that talk about the models and also discusses people’s concerns. The article must be friendly, informative, and not overtly trying to sell. Put it this way, the page must be BOOKMARK or Facebook Share-worthy.
Once you have built the page, tell all the blogs, twitter, facebook page, forum posts, etc you used to research the article ABOUT the article.
Rinse and repeat
Slow but sure way to build AUTHORITY based on REAL human needs instead of playing tag with Google’s algorithm.
Curious what else you consider will do harm? So by your logic the billions of people that buy advertsing on a site (AKA banners linked to their site) are doing harm? I think not.
