Creating Authoritative Sites

This email was sent to me in private but I think you will benefit from the information I am giving here:

From: marshall@xxxxxxxx.com (removed for privacy reasons)
To: manny-ppc@hotmail.com

Hey Manny

Thank you for your SEO insight into my 10,000 page question

I am now going in the direction of making 1 high quality authoritative content page for each of my top 20
keywords from analytics reports.

Do you have a blog or any articles to point me to in writing this authoritative content?

Also, I have used an SEO company to make 300 links a month to my site for 6 keywords.
the reports show these pages are PR 2… is this even worth it?
Or is it a smoke and mirror that does not work?

thanks again for your input…

Answer:

I can not give away all my secrets since I make a living from providing high end SEO services to large corporations and clients that pay me up to $30,000 per month for me to do something that not one else is doing, but I will give you enough information that will help you and most of the readers of this group (sorry about that)

1) Make sure to select the best, I mean the best keywords possible for your site! this is very important, without this you will waste your time and money
2) Analyze your competition, what are they doing, what are they lacking, look for opportunities
3) If possible use a blog for your site, there are a few plugins that can really make a difference and help you for SEO purposes
4) Make sure you have a good site structure, for humans and for Google

update: sorry, forgot this important one: make sure you do a site audit, try to find all the errors that may prevent your site from ranking well in the search engines, look at your sitemap, robots.txt, spider loops (traps), 404 pages, duplicate titles, empty titles, duplicated content, not enough content on categories or pages, etc etc…

5) Create your content, make sure it is authoritative, as Google wants and as I explained before, each page should target one or two of your selected keywords in step 1.
6) For each good quality page you create in your site, create a supportive group of posts that will help it rank, pass PR, pass authority and reputation (if these terms are too hard to understand then you better hire someone to do this for you)
7) Do linkbuilding, make sure to do this properly, this can make or break your efforts and here is where most people do it wrong, hiring a company that contacted you from India offering a $199 service that can rank any site in Google for any keyword, for any market, it is actually too good to be true. Here is the deal, great SEO cost money, trust me! I have a team of 80 people, 1000 testing sites, and a lot of custom software, offices with PCs, internet, utilities, etc, etc… do you think I can charge $199 and make a living?

Anyways, there are a few reputable SEO companies that know what they are doing, find one that you can trust and do this: Let them do SEO for you, you concentrate on what you are best at! growing your business! get it? I know how to fix little things in my car, but do I take 10 hours of my time to do something that a professional can do in 2 hours and I can stead spend that time making money online?

If you still want to do this part yourself, then get links from some of these sources:

Blogs, forums, newspapers, press releases, software directories, PDF directories, join related blogs to your industry and help them, build a reputation and you will get followers, etc etc… there are many techniques that we have talked about before or you can find out by searching Google, but the key is this, do SEO not only for rankings, do it for traffic!

What do I mean? OK, most people thing Google is the internet, Google is the place to be, which is true when we talking about traffic coming from search engines, but did you know that there is a huge number of people that can come to your site not via the search engines? this sources are even bigger than Google, we are talking about social media sites such as Facebook, twitter, and many others. Also, I get a lot of traffic from an article I wrote and was picked and posted on a site and the visitors to that site saw it and click on my link and visited my site, this is traffic that did not come directly from Google.

8) Make sure you have installed Google analytics, webmaster tools, or other tracking software. Learn to use this softwares and analyze your traffic, you will find a lot of long tail keywords that you can optimize your site for, will give you information such as CTR, bounce rate, stay on site, activity, all great values that will help you with your SEO efforts.

9) Test, test, test. Create some test cases, do them, analyze results, modify, improve, implement, test again…

10) Keep looking for opportunities, there are everywhere, concentrate on growing your business.

I am sure I am missing something here and there, but I hope it is just enough information to motivate you and give you an idea what needs to be done.

Oh, I almost forgot one, make sure to capture leads, the money is in the list :)

I am sure others will fill in the points I forgot :)

Thanks for your question