I'm so glad I came across this forum researching SEO and
Nigritude Ultramarine. By far, one of the most informative and open SEO forums I have come across. Bear with me as this is a long post, but it may help others down the road from any responses I get.
I have some basic questions about the SEO process. I always read, ..."then I learned SEO". But how can you "learn" SEO when there are so many supposed myths and facts? Anyways, in this topic, I would just like some feed back about the order in which most of you start the process. I have 2 main products I'm trying to sell, along with 2 sites; both with catchy domain names but neither have any keywords in the domain name. The first is a crowded market; the second is a not so crowded market. They are debt consolidation (I'm also a recruiter for the service), and skip trace services (cell phone history report, etc.). I have read steps 1 and 2 that John provided.
Step 1 - SEO Copywriting. I think I know the basics as I have created this site for testing based off of an ebook I read:
http://www.treatacnenow.com/acne_tre..._treatment.php . I just noticed tonight that it finally got ranked at it's at a PR3.
I must be doing something right.
Step 2 - Anchor Text and Inbound Links. I think a grasp the concept, but what about Search Engine Submission? I know it's important, but how many of these are recommended? DMOZ is a big name and FREE. Is it worth the costs for the others? Name over Price?
Step 3 - Step 3 will be what I think Step 1 should be: site design with SEO in mind. I've been researching the development practice of a web page purely from CSS design for SEO purposes. Is it that much more affective? On my acne site, I made sure the first word in the first cell was my key word in <h1> brackets. Is this the same result you can get with CSS design and does it make that big of a difference? Design is far more important for my 2, before mentioned sites, than a site with acne information. With that being said, I would love to have someone
review both sites. I won't post in this thread as I don't want to be accused of spamming.
Step 4 - Reciprical Linking. So after submitting to all of the directories, do you dedicate time each day for reciprical linking? Do you guys/gals suggest only sticking with relevant swaps like my debt site to another debt type site? Is anybody using a link swap management system? If so, which one? Does contributing to relevant Blogs help (non-abusive posting of course)?
Step 5 - New Content. I've read that adding new content helps also. If there's really not much to add for sites selling a service or specific product, does adding an article section help? How often should things be updated?
Step 6 - Patience. I imagine this is most important of all - because I am running out of it
. In the competition for the term
Nigritude Ultramarine, the top listings are by those with already well established sites, thus the fast indexing. How much time should one let pass without seeing desired results until something is done differently?
I'm also curious about one other thing, which may be considered a step, and that's planning for the development of a site and it's host provider. For my skip trace site, I made sure I found a host that would provide a unique IP address for the site. Why? Hell if I know; I've just seen a 50/50 response on whether that matters or not from other forums. Better safe than sorry. But I have to ask here; does it matter and what proof is there that it does? And furthermore, are there any tweaks or adjustments I need to make to the .htaccess file? I've only used it to rewrite php to html for one of my vacant forums. Anything else one should know?
Many thanks in advance.
