Forum Moderators: open
Stage(1) - Good content with regular updates. (Pretty much speaks for itself I know).
Stage (2) - Directories -
Open Directory, Yahoo, Looksmart, DMOZ, Local directories.
Stage (3) Keyword Optimization.
Stage (4) Meta Tags
**Note - is WPG 2 the best for the above tasks? What does anyone recommend for the above two tasks?
Stage (5) Submission - Manual submission to all the majors, maybe automated to all the lesser ones.
Stage (6) Links - Reciprocal links and even perhaps building my own links sites related to product, with my site being linked several times.
Stage (7) Occassional banner ads, submission to "Topsites" - eg - top 100 such and such sites.
Other methods: (not to sure on these)
--Pay per click (not overture etc, but a company who will pay 10'000 people to visit my site etc). Does anyone use this to improve rankings?
--Click exchane sites - (have heard they are utterly useless, but just need conformation of this).
--FFA Sites - Same as above, but just in case anybody has anything different to say.
Ok, that's me done, appreciate any feedback.....
Since so many searches are done through Google these days I would suggest you adopt Brett's Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone [webmasterworld.com] as your bible. You can't go far wrong with that.
As to your proposed plan I would say:
(1)Write Content (keyword optimisation should be done here)
(2)Submit to directories
(5) submissions to SEs - there's no harm in doing it manually to the majors but if you have a link from an already existing site then your site will be indexed. You can ignore the minors.
(6)Reciprocal links to your site (but the links site idea is a no-go because you would have to promote this to get people to link to it - better to spend your energies on your main site)
and I would say all the others are almost useless (and paid clicks and click exchange really are useless). Get good rankings and have good titles then you will get good, free targetted traffic.
Anyway have a good read of Brett's article and remember to be patient - this all takes time.
On your list, no. 6 (in respect of dedicated links sites) is not worth it.
Incidentally, the Open Directory *is* dmoz.
Good luck with the site,
TJ
He he, whoopsy daisy.
Thanks for all the input again people, I have printed out that excellent Google article.
