SEO Marketing

[beerup949]

Hi all,

My buddy and I are in the initial phases of building our website and registering it though the major search engines. My question is - How easy is it to SEO market the site myself? Any tips or suggestions?

[Deadbolt]

90% of SEO is good, well formed (semantically) mark up and making sure that your copy (text) is concise, doesn't repeat itself (you will be dinged for repetition of exact copy) and uses industry (whatever industry you are part of) terminology.

Google has begun using actual content again as a marker and they are relying less and less on "referral links" like they had in the past.

The bigger the players in the industry, the harder it will be to out SEO them simply because of budget.

That being said, you should be able to get solid results simply from having a well formed site with all the accessibility items effectively leveraged (alt tags etc.. )

Once your site has good copy and clean markup - from there SEO explodes in cost via Pay per Click campaigns and the like. Those fees will increase related to, as mentioned, your industry and competitor's budget ( if homeboy competitor is spending 3k/ month to be #1, you'll probably not get to the #1 position on a basic keyword search without similar buy in -- this isn't a bad thing, find what separates you from them and capitalize on this - the keywords will be cheaper and the less coverage they have in a relative market the better for you )

Its unfortunately still a game of volume in a lot of situations

edit: that being said, do not let it deter you from shaping your content and site to meet best practices ( a wandering target indeed) and the above is a gross over simplification of what "should be simple but isn't "

[speedrrracer]

SEO / SEM are careers. Obviously there is a do-it-yourself angle which will gain you some benefits with reduced expense, so you have to determine what kind of results you want for your site.

Do you want / need pro results or DIY results? If you don't need pro results, then I'd recommend reading some / all of the books on a list such as this:

http://www.amazon.com/Top-Best-SEO-Books-Ever/lm/R2ZJ80G4COWMSZ

and go from there.

IMHO, recent Google updates have made SEO more amenable to a DIY approach, but it will never be a trivial exercise.

[Coded-Dude]

Are you going to run a Blog or other CMS styled site(Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.), a shopping cart style site(Zen Cart, CS-CArt, etc.), or are you building a site from the ground up(html, php, flash, etc.). This matters when deciding how to write and maintain your SEO relevant code.

TITLE & DESCRIPTION meta tags along with relative PAGE TEXT(not images of text) are crucial for good placement. The KEYWORDS meta tag is still used by some smaller and/or foreign search engines, but google/yahoo/etc don't really weigh it anymore. Your most important Keyword or Keyphrase needs to be in all three places I mentioned.

[Autarchist]

There has been some good, solid up-to-date advice posted above.

An effective SEO/SEM strategy is case-dependent. If you give more info we can help point you in a good direction. What industry are you in? Who is your target audience/market? What "type" of site is it?

[beerup949]

There has been some good, solid up-to-date advice posted above.

An effective SEO/SEM strategy is case-dependent. If you give more info we can help point you in a good direction. What industry are you in? Who is your target audience/market? What "type" of site is it?

We are a lifestyle clothing company (in the works). We will be initially marketing to people that range in age from 18-40. The site will basically be the go to page to purchase our goods and also update potential onlookers of upcoming events / product releases. We already have a facebook page, working on twitter and YouTube etc. our website will also include a blog and "

[Deadbolt]

We are a lifestyle clothing company (in the works). We will be initially marketing to people that range in age from 18-40. The site will basically be the go to page to purchase our goods and also update potential onlookers of upcoming events / product releases. We already have a facebook page, working on twitter and YouTube etc. our website will also include a blog and "look book".

www.loclclothing.com (just started building)

capitalize on the bold and carve out a niche from there would be my suggestion. Until you have cemented yourself in a specific niche, any paid SEO would be a waste of funds for such a broad industry imho

[beerup949]

capitalize on the bold and carve out a niche from there would be my suggestion. Until you have cemented yourself in a specific niche, any paid SEO would be a waste of funds for such a broad industry imho

What do you mean by capitalize on the bold?

[Deadbolt]

Well online clothing is a very broad swath of industry. In your own words, your company specializes in UPCOMING EVENTS & PRODUCT RELEASE(s) related merchandising.

If that is accurate then work that angle w/ your site copy and promotion and the SEO will flow naturally when someone is looking for promotion clothing design

etc.... you need to be both broad and specific with your market targeting while not being too specific or too board

like i said earlier : something that should be simple but isnt

[Deadbolt]

also - dont be afraid to brand different portions of your site with different SEO implications


or wait, thats starting to dip into "pay for" knowledge

[beerup949]

also - dont be afraid to brand different portions of your site with different SEO implications


or wait, thats starting to dip into "pay for" knowledge

Haha

Thanks for the advise.

[Coded-Dude]

If you're manually building the site, you can go here and enter in your SEO data: http://www.sitesolutions.com/metagener.asp It will automatically generate the surrounding tags for you to paste into the heading of your webpages. You can also sign up for a google analytics account and paste their script into any web pages you want to track for marketing and sales data.

[Nick4u1]

There are a number of useful resources and tools.

SEOmoz
SEObook

and if youre doing backlink research I have been using Ahrefs.com which is quite a new system, uses its own crawler. Or you can use opensiteexplorer.

A combination of effective competitor research, copy, and backlink building should equip you well to compete. I often say the skill isn't knowing what but in knowing how. It takes a long time to be a competent link builder!