Questions questions and more questions !!

[WonderWoman]

Hello,

I'm a newbie here...been reading the forum intensively for the past week or so and it's been a lifesaver for me since I'm working on the Marketing Dept. of a sports company and they're now launching an SEO campaign which I'm supposed to be in charge of. I have so many questions and although I've done my homework and through this and other sites I've learned tons in the past few days, it just seems like such a monster task to get well ranked (at least that's the impression I get as if it were rocket science!!! ) so needless to say I'm a bit worried.

I thought this would be the perfect place to lay out these questions and see if the kind fellows here would be eager to help me out!

Here we go:

1. From my understanding, a broad search term won't help me because it simply is too competitive and will make harder for my site to rank well correct? For example if I have a data outsourcing business I should go for those words and not only business as it would simply kill my chances since there's all types of businesses and contexts for which people would search that term...am I correct?

2. Does Adding Podcasts to your webpage affect in any way how Search engines index the site? Does it affect the ranking negatively or even positively?

3. Do pop-ups affect ranking negatively, positively or simply have no effect?

4. Examining different competitor sites I've found that only one of these had lots of meta tags on their configuration, i.e. rating, copyright, destination, language, distribution, etc Is this recommended or simply sticking to title, description and keywords will work?

5. I'm starting out by analyzing what we already have on the site as far as keywords and content of the page, then I'm studying what our niche competitors are aiming too and from there I'll be combining what I already have in terms of keyterms and content with what is bringing current results to them and what based on some experiments I think would bring the best results. After that I plan on applying these changes and then looking to do link exchanges, Adwords, etc. Am I going the right path? Anything I should be doing first instead, anything I missed?

ANY AND ALL help whatsoever will be MUCH appreciated LOL It's kind of a challenge to me so I really want to get this right and learn as much as I can about it!

Thanks everyone and have a nice weekend!

[Ferre]

Hi and welcome to v7n.

To answer your questions;

1- Correct.
2- Podcasts do not have any efect on the serps but they do have their own directories, listeners, etc. It does not effect your rankings positive or negative but it can expose your busyness to a whole new audience.
Mind that promoting a podcast is just as labour intensive as promoting a website.
3- Do not use pop ups, they only irritate your visitors and there are more user-friendly ways to catch your visitor's attention.
4- Simply sticking to title, description and keywords, and make sure the description is for people, not robots.
5- You are going the right path.

[John Scott]

From my understanding, a broad search term won't help me because it simply is too competitive and will make harder for my site to rank well correct? For example if I have a data outsourcing business I should go for those words and not only business as it would simply kill my chances since there's all types of businesses and contexts for which people would search that term...am I correct?

The more specific the keywords the better. And, I have to ask, why are you doing SEO as opposed to pay-per-click?

[Johan007]

A bad Podcasts is a waist of time however a good Podcast has done site like www.themovieblog.com really well and hits are going up (however it does cost bandwith).

[WonderWoman]

Thank you for answering my questions and helping out a newbie! lol Ferre, JohnScott and Johan.

Well I'm glad to know that I'm going in the right direction.
Why am I doing SEO instead of Pay per click? Well I have not much knowledge about pay per click. How would that help me out with SEO, do you know of any tutorials so I can learn more about it?

In regards to the PodCast my idea is to make it really interesting, something people would actually like to listen to and not simply a bad sales pitch. Just like a radio show or something of that sort that would make people want to come back over and over again.

One last question...for the blog www.postsecret.com did the owner of the site do SEO or did it simply climb to a Google PR of 7 because of how many people went and clicked on it or told their friends at forums etc? I know the site's incredibly popular now...so I was thinking if a site could simply go up in rankings by popularity alone, ( not having to do link exchange or other Seo tactics ) and because people spread the word because the site's good?

I hope I'm not confusing you all lol thanks for the help

[Michael Allison]

and make sure the description is for people, not robots.

By that, do you mean write it for people or somehow exclude robots from reading it?

Thanks,
Michael

[Ferre]

Originally Posted by Michael Allison

By that, do you mean write it for people or somehow exclude robots from reading it?

Thanks,
Michael

What I mean is to write it in such a manner that people would be interested in clicking the link when the description is shown in the search results.
Some website owners stuff as many as possible keywords in the description in the hope that bots pick it up which makes it unpleasent reading for people.

Robots read it anyway, but it's people who deside if they want to visit a site or not.

[Michael Allison]

Whew!!

You had me scared for a minute!! I thought I had maybe messed something up that was pretty basic. No - I did ok, though!

Thanks!

-Michael