Optimal White Hat SEO Method Opinions

Hello All,

I am relatively new to SEO and have decided to take a Whitish Grey Hat approach for my business. I am trying to piece together a systematic step by step approach which is both repeatable and consistent for all of my "potential" clients. Let's keep in mind that the majority of my clients target keywords are going to be long tail with little SEO competition. Of course my primary goal for each client is first page ranking for approximately 5-10 different keywords.

The point of this post is for me to share what I believe is a good starting point for a strategy, and have all of the more experienced forum members comment and suggest changes to this vanilla approach. I feel that this will help the newer members (such as myself) and serve as a great reference post .

Here are the basic steps I have assembled thus far:

Step 1: Keyword Research: After speaking with a potential client, I will research the keywords which they recommend or which I feel are appropriate to their line of business. Once this list is compiled I will do a little legwork in looking into the current leaders in their respective fields for a particular keyword. Assuming I do a good job in determining the keywords necessary I will move to step 2.

Step 2: Assuming they do not yet have a website we will be making one for them as well. This process will simply incorporate keyword rich (but readable) content into a well structured website. I guess there is no reason to go into gory details here but a soild site will be neccesary to be succesful. Now that the site is built (with all original content) we will move on.

(This is where the steps may be out of order, or simply unneccesary ? please make suggestions!)

Step 3: I am working on a list of solid reputable Internet Directories. (Does anyone have a list?) I was thinking of choosing 3-4 paid directories, and around 300-400 free directories. I plan on submitting my link with keyword rich anchor text to 100 directories per week for about 3-4 weeks. I do not want too many links too fast. I will also be submitting manually to DMOZ as I hear this takes an eternity to be listed in. The budget for the paid directories should fall within 200-300 dollars. (Any suggestions for which paid directories to shoot for?) This step will overlap with other steps but it is the first that I will take in the way of link building

Step 3 Question: Should I distribute the keywords in the anchor text evenly? Or should I simply sprinkle some of the lesser competition keywords here and there. (Let?s assume that of the 5 keywords there are 2 mid-high competition and 3 low competition)

Step 4: Creation of a Wordpress blog on the respective client?s website. So I will be adding a blog like so: hxxp://www.abcdefg.com/blog. I will install all of the appropriate plugins and use this in later steps with my keyword rich articles that I will write in step 5. I would like to try and keep the actual websites free of clutter and just stick to the actual services they offer on each page. (Hence the creation of the blog)

Step 4 question: How should I approach promoting this blog? Should this step be moved above step 3? Should I incorporate a blog link building campaign as well? I want some of the PR and link juice to be passed to the main domain as well!

Step 5: In this step I will simply create articles and a press release for this particular company. If I am knowledgable on their business topics I will simply create these articles myself. If not, I plan on having a solid base of freelancers ready to write for me. As for the press release I do not have a clue yet. Once this content is created I will use it in the next step.

Step 5 question: Where would I find a good press release submission site, and article submission site?

Step 6: Having found some solid article directory submission service, I will submit these articles once per week for as long as it takes to submit all of the articles. The Author Bio box will contain anchor tags that match my keywords of course.

Step 7: Forum posting for links is an option here, but I do not have enough knowledge on the subject to write the steps here. (Any Suggestions?)

Step 8: Rinse and Repeat I suppose. I will keep doing the above until I reach my goals.

So how does this sound? Please, please fill me in on any problems that you see. I truly am relying on the veterans to make this approach more solid. Thanks a million! (In advance)


- Jeff

Great post jeff
Thanks for taking the time to write this

No Problem! I will be updating this method as time goes on. With some help fromthe forum members I hope to make it even better!

You've outllined a good plan. My personal take on the 300-400 free directories is it will mostly be a waste of time. Those directories were discounted by Google a few months ago - I saw a drop in the SERPs for my sites that had them. I submit to some paid directories (Clush is awesome for $20) and a number a free directories that have PR, but not hundreds, and the sites do well. Distribute your keywords evenly.

Make sure your page titles are all different and have each page's assigned keywords in them. Also make sure those keywords are in your meta description. I have proven (to myself) that the meta description does have an effect on SERPs.

Regarding the blog, make sure that you link some of the keywords within the content back to relevant pages in the site. Blogs get crawled regularly when they have frequent fresh content, and that will lead the spider into the site itself. Submit blog postings to the social directories to gain traffic.

PR Web is a good press release site.

That's a pretty good outline. I'd add in some smart social bookmarking plans. Even the bookmarking sites that nofollow links are useful, especially with Yahoo & MSN, and for press releases I always use pr*com and have never had a release there that didn't get picked up by Google news.

Thanks for this excellent resource. Are you otherwise agreeing with the steps? Should I add this Social Bookmarking to the end of the process?

IMO social marketing to get traffic is a mixed bag. You can see a nice boost in short-term traffic, but it depends on your niche/topic and the sites you're using for your efforts. But a number of web 2.0 sites are excellent for link building. The following case studies may give you an idea or 2 .



replace the x with t, w3 with www and * with .

gross100
Jesus everyone will thin l am being negative today with my post however l can see you asking for advice and in the same breath mentioning your clients, don't you think it would be wise to learn the stuff yourself first before you mislead others with lack of experience.

Nicho,

I am simply trying to refine the method I currently have in place. This method has worked well, but I am always trying to find ways to improve. At the same time I am trying to give this method to other members to do what they please. This is simply what I have been doing and would like to see what other White Hatters think of it.

This was in now way meant to mislead anyone. As a matter of fact I feel that it can only do more good than harm in that all of these steps are very general SEO practices. I mean, how am I "Misleading People" by saying that one should research keywords, submit to some directories, create a blog, and writ some articles?. For that matter, how are any of the other steps misleading or negative? If you have any advice on how to change it I'd be willing to hear you out, if not I don't feel your post contributed much to this thread.

- Jeff

Jeff,

You've pretty much got the whole thing right! It's just how well you execute the parts that will decide how successful you are at this.

Thanks for the info - does the popularity of the keywords in the meta description have any bearing - eg should we go for stuffing or relevancy ?

I always shoot for relevancy, as the description will more than likely be used as part of the snippet that big G shows a potential visitor. I'd rather give them something readable in order to lure them to my particular site.

Hope that helps.