Starting my SEO strategy: Start with reading

It’s difficult to know where to start when creating an SEO strategy. I’ve currently been asked to come up with one. There seems to be many things you can do and all of your colleagues and friends seem to know something different. It’s not like they have concrete knowledge of things that will help you though, its more more like they have different fragments of the magic rune. Where do you start?

When creating an SEO Plan I started by creating three headings; these were Long Term, Mid Term and Short Term. Under each heading I placed the things that I thought needed to do. My first list looked like this:

todo

At this point I have no idea what I am doing. I heard people say that if you slay an iPod mini every day to the god of SEO you will reach number one in Google, but only if you forward this message to everyone on your friends list. You can tell by my list I have no idea what’s going on. Who still writes lists down anyway? But I have circled “Do some reading”. I scraped the list and decided to go with that.

I headed over to Reddit/r/SEO to ask about SEO Books. Lots of people beat me to it, but according to the comments to this regularly asked question it turns out that the general census is that books are out of date as soon as they are printed. Still, they all agree that reading is how you MUST start your strategy. There are a few books that apparently might be good to supplement your knowledge; Don’t make me think being the most quoted one.

I feel pretty lost without a book on my desk regarding the subject, but redditors assured me that the way to go was to read web based content that is constantly updated. There are 4 frequent recommendations, which I am just about to get started on. These are the  resources that cropped up the most by Reddit users for each recommendation:

1. Learn SEO basics:

We should start by watching the SEO pyramid followed by reading beginners guide to seo  apparently these two are a must before we start to do anything.

2. Think about strategies to building links

This post on building links is a apparently a “noobs” guide, but should start us off well. 

3. Make sure your content is good content

This is going to be hard for me since I’m working for an organisation where everybody is writing their own content! Still this guide to awesome content  and this guide to linkbait should help. I currently have no idea what linkbait is.

4. Analyse

The links on Reddit were mostly to articles talking about Google Analytics, which I think we are all getting pretty good at using now. It did however point to this series by Moz which has lots of different ways to analyse usage of your site.

Bonus:

33 free seo tools you should know about is apparently pretty good too.

Right-o. I’m off to the library to pick up that one book and then I’ve got a few days reading ahead of me! Apparently your strategy should be constantly changing, so I can see this becoming a series of posts. I’ll report back soon.