Everyday SEO activities?

What should SEOs do on a regular basis?

[Lilacor]

Hi, all!

I have just registrated into this huge forum and this is my first thread on it:) I would like to hear your suggestions about the activities that every SEO specialist should regularly do (almost every day, for instance) in order to make their site rank better in Google, Yahoo! & MSN.

Is there s.th. like a universal recipe or at least s.th. close to it? Thanks in advance, and excuse my writing if any mistakes in it :)

I usually start with registrating the website in the biggest directories, both local and foreign. Than I write some PR articles here and there (in PR sites, where it's not forbidden to post an advertising content), than I continue with some social bookmarking sites. There I post some short info and a link to the site I want to advertise and wait to see what happens... But then what? I have to say that I'm not an expert, as a matter of fact, I began studying SEO just 2 months ago, so sorry if my questions sound a bit silly...

Best regards,

Lilacor

[Lilacor]

Anybody? Come on, people...

[edited by: Lilacor at 7:48 pm (utc) on May 27, 2008]

[MadeWillis]

I would say -

Read this forum on a daily basis for starters

[pageoneresults]

Read this forum on a daily basis for starters.

You know, I saw this topic when it first started and thought to myself...

Read this forum on a daily basis for starters.

That is a really great bit of advice. We're in the trenches here so every little thing that the Search Engines do, we are usually the first to know about it. And, since the community is so large, you have an FAQs available to you 24/7/365. You can pretty much post in any forum and get a response within a reasonable time frame, in some instances, within minutes.

We do promote the use of the Forum Libraries which are located at the top of each forum. There you'll find highlighted posts that are like your core reading material. Some are old, but don't let that deter you from reading them as many still apply today. There are core concepts that have not changed much over the years. Knowing those will greatly reduce your "time to market" as they say.

What should SEOs do on a regular basis?

Whatever your skillset allows you to do. And, at the same time, you may want to expand and improve upon those skillsets. WebmasterWorld is a great place to start, stay, learn and then give back. I look at it as a Continuing Education adventure. :)

[idolw]

I find it much better to work on plan/campaign basis. That means that I analyse the problems and needs in terms of positions - what keywords I want to go for, how hard they are and what can I do about it.
I then plan my strategy to fullfill my needs and figure out the time and money required. I put it into a plan than.
Once I got that I just follow my plan. That fills my work life in 100% ;)

So my best advice is: PLAN
Make sure you have a plan that covers at least next 14 days. Once you get there it will be easy.

[g1smd]

Check and check again. I make sure to clean up coding errors, fix busted links, validate what I am doing, and monitor everything.

I look at site stats regularly to gain insight into trends, and maybe help suggest new or updated topics.

[Lilacor]

Thank you, mates! I suppose I should start reading the topics for beginners on this huge forum at first. Could you give me some links to start with? Something like that: [webmasterworld.com...] . It's really a great post, very useful.

Thanks in advance!

Nick (a.k.a. Lilacor)

[semcommonsense]

Are you from Australia? Since you use "mates?"

Not a bad question...

A few suggestions to add to what you're doing regularly:
*improve your content in some manner: for bloggers, it's adding a good post that hopefully gets indexed or becomes viral. For other sites, you may refine the content or add extra pages that are relevant for visitors.
*Not only "Read this forum daily", but read other blogs as well. I could give you a list of like a hundred if you wanted. I try to read as much as possible, but of course there's limitations.
*Participate in some educational programs in SEO: Adwords Certification, SEMPO's programs and the others that are available online.
*Maybe create your own website on SEO and leverage it to help your learnings. <snip> I'm hopefully adding to others' knowledge, but also reinforcing the knowledge I already know.
*Evaluate other "more successful" SEO folks out there in the world; examine how they may be doing something differently from what you do
*for me, i love keywords. So, I try to conduct a daily keyword search. Fortunately, I have a program that does it for me, but it cost me a couple hundred bucks. I think it's worth it for now. If you ever have any requests, let me know and I'll send you the results.

I could come up with a few other suggestions, but just wanted to add a few more for ya. Happy SEO'ing.

A question to you: which one of your 3 or so activities do you find give you the most impact or turnaround? Are you doing the SEO for your site or for clients? Are you doing it full time? I think this will determine how much time you can dedicate to all this.

[edited by: engine at 7:34 pm (utc) on June 4, 2008]
[edit reason] no specifics, thanks. [/edit]

[martinibuster]

Review traffic logs/reports. Many significant datapoints, off the top of my head including month to month comparisons, referrers, keywords used to access site, most important landing pages, and click paths. That data is important for making changes, picking up errors, seeing what others think about your site, what people are coming there for (may not be what you think), and more reasons that lead to improvement of visitor experience as well as clicks and sales.