SEO Hell !!

I've been reading this wonderful forum for a couple of months and finally took action.
1. Domains - check
2. Hostgator - check
3. Wordpress - check
4. Articles with 90% score of SEOpressor - check
5. SEO platinum - check
6. Pings - check
7. Indexed in Google - check

Now, the offsite SEO, my least favorite part. There's so much info out there about it, but so much contradicting.

Here's what I've read from different posters and ebooks etc.

1. Build as many links as you can.
2. Build only relevant links.
3. Dont build them all at once.
4. Use softwares to automatically do this and that.
5. Google doesn't like automated shit, only manually done shit.
6. XYZ will get you 100s of links in a flash!
7. Build you links gradually. Google might ban you if linkbuilding looks unnatural.

Not being sure what to do, I used XGen SEO to bookmark at more than 100 web 2.0 whorehouses. But upon checking a few days later it says my site has no backlinks.

Can someone please point me to the right direction, right ebook, right software or anything that works!

My personal experience (I'm an SEO consultant and p/t niche marketer):

Keyword research

Keyword research is the most overlooked part of SEO, imo. You need to make sure that the terms you're targeting actually get traffic. Fire up google keyword tool and run your searches, but on the left side select 'exact match' and deselect 'broad match' - this will give you a good idea of how much traffic you can get. (In niche marketing I don't usually touch anything under 1k exact match searches/mo - but depending on product and keyword I will make exceptions).

Competition research

Find out how many competing pages there are for the term, you do this by running a search with your keyphrase in quotes. Depending on your skill level you can pick your own level, but as a general rule I'd stick to kws under 30k competing pages if you're new. I go up to 250-300k depending on the traffic involved and the niche.

Next I run a search using the 'allintitle' operator - you use this by keeping your phrase in quotes and adding 'allintitle: ' before you kw phrase. I find that anything under 5k is solid, I go up to 30k ish.

But those are just general rules, because the last part is one of the most important:

You need to analyze your competition on a per-domain basis for the top 10 results. What I mean is, you need to make sure it's actually possible to bump someone out of the top 10. If you're going after a term like 'samsung led tv', it may check out in the above competition research parts, but if samsung.com/led-tvs is ranking #1.. there's no way in hell you'll bump them.

Commercial viability

Microsoft has a tool for judging commercial intent, just google 'ad lab commercial intent'. Basically it tells you if a search term is commercially viable, a.k.a are people searching for this actually going to spend money.

If someone is searching for jokes or recipes, it's unlikely they'll want to buy anything. So you'd want to avoid those unless you were just going for straight ad impressions. On the other hand, someone searching for <product name + model number> or <product name + review> is more likely to be in a buying mode and will likely click through and buy your product. The ad lab tool gives you a rough idea of whether or not it's a good term.

Domains

You can gain an unfair advantage in the serps by having a phrase match domain. Say you're targeting 'samsung led tv' again, if you can get samsungledtv .com/org - you'll automatically have some ranking benefit over the rest of your competition. (.net is a last resort IMO, .info/biz/me/whatever are just crap and don't rank nearly as well in my experience).

Links

Scope your your competition first. Use OpenSiteExplorer.org/Yahoo Site Explorer/BacklinkWatch (/whatever tool you have) to see where your competition are getting their links from. Look for their highest quality links and see if you can get linked there as well. I usually dig through the top 20 and look for blogs/forums/directories that I can jump in on.

This works especially well for my local clients who mostly have competitors just getting links from directories - find all the directories the top 20 use and you rocket past them.

Going forward from that, you can do article writing, profile links, etc. Oh, and in my experience.. relevancy is irrelevant. High quality links are links. I have had sites that got all of their links from profiles and blogs/forums unrelated to their niche (like, complete 180 on relevance) and they still rank amazingly. As long as you're getting some decent quality links and making use of solid anchor text, you'll rank easily.

Regarding # of links.. I'd say a slight burst at the beginning is fine and then slowly add a handful of links each day if you can.


Hope this helps

EDIT: The reason your backlinks aren't showing up is because the tools aren't always up to date. It takes awhile for them to get crawled in those tools. You should also be pinging all of your backlinks if you can - just plop the URLs in pingomatic after you build the link.

Also realized I basically just wrote a novel.. hmm.. maybe I should put this all in an ebook.. barely scraping the surface here

Throw in a few affiliate links and sell it as a WSO now.

Thanks and I'll try all that now.