SEO...Where to begin

Great forum...

While I have experience in web advertising, I don't have much experience in SEO. So, my question is, with a limited budget, what is the low hanging fruit? Where should I start. Link building? Should I fork over the 300 bucks for a listing in Yahoo Dir...or should I focus on other less costly links.

Much thanks.

Do not fork over the money to Yahoo for Dir listing!

If you are going to spend money, spend it on a google Adwords placement. This is more popular and will direct you the most traffic for mostly likely the least amount of cash.

Without a budget needed, get yourself into the major directories, (DMOZ,Yahoo!, and some other major human edited web dirs).

Next start to build smart linking strategies within your site. Make sure that a spider will get to your deep pages.

Get your site map into googles site maps http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/siteoverview?hl=en

Start getting links from other sites, that have similar content, using your keywords in the link text.

Optimize your content to use <H1> <H2> <H3> tags.

Get new and fresh content on your site as often as possible.

Make an RSS feed.

Use Alt tags on your images.

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Those are just some of the things you can start doing to get SEO'd.

Cheers!

Agree totally. Get your own pages right first.

Make sure it (your site) reads well semantically, you have good keywords and descriptions in place. Make sure that the first half of your page contains the most relevant details about the page / site. Create nice urls that are faily desciptive of the page, or at least of the keywords of the page.

Make good site map, google likes site maps. You can even make a site map especially for them, and register it on google - so they will spider your site as you want. (edit - posted above already).

When that is done, submit to search engines.

Dmoz etc. are good place to leave links. Join forums etc. be there long enough to be allowed a signature, place your links in your sig.

hi,

i do agree with you people. every time the seo starts from on the page. on page optimization is very essential to make a site successful.

for on page optimization you should :

1) write a keyword rich content
2) make a good site map
3)give header tags.

complete the site and submit it in search engines.

always try to make changes in conent and try to give fresh content, as google loves fresh content.

cheers:
rudradatta
http://www.purebathrooms.net