As always, the folks at SEOmoz never cease to add value. One of the biggest challenges I face as an online marketer is to allocate my time appropriately to tasks of important to meet both, my short-term and long-term objectives. Easier said than done in the dynamic world of business. Based on the cool time management graphic that SEOMoz put together, here are my thoughts on what you should be doing for each category below :
Building Viral-Worthy, Authoritative Content (40%)
Create articles, blogs posts and multimedia content that will provide value to your visitors. I’m going to shirk from mentioning the viral-worthy term simply because then you’ll tend to waste your time thinking of something sensationalist or over-the-top without focusing on the fundamentals and that’s good relevant content building on your products and services. This will help you get a sense of what works and what doesn’t.
Spend time understanding your visitors behavior when they visit your website. Be practical, don’t be under the illusion that a visitor will be inclined to view your website as favorably as you. Remember that your visitor has a million other things to do and your website of product may just be a ripple in the pond. Research your product’s description on the web or on different websites (competitors or product comparisons or review websites) and aim to make your content the best. Content is key – it’s what will get the search engines to index your website and improve your relevancy and ranking in the SERPS when someone enters a keyword in a search engine.
Developing New Features/Designs (25%)
Great advice here. When it comes to your website, you should always be thinking of the next generation offering that you can insert into the visitor’s experience to get him to stick around. If your e-commerce site has live chat, think about adding video demos. If your lackluster GUI looks and feels like 2002, upgrade it. Development while being a component that varies with time committed is also something that be can focused on a regular basis. Separate the long-term development plans (move to another platform or technology) from the short-term dev plans (neat widget for the website, application using a third party API etc). Run this task well keeping in mind the needs of the programmers, designers and site architects in mind, this will lead to fewer conflicts.
Keyword, Industry, & Competitive Research (10%)
A very important task. Spend some time checking out your competitors’ website. Along with classic keyword research to find terms to target (Use a tool like Wordtracker or Google’s Adwords Tool), you should also consider:
- Identifying & researching new players in your market.
- Investigating new opportunities on the web that could be leveraged to the benefit of your site.
- Changes in keyword popularity or the introduction of a new phrase that could spell opportunity.
- Analysis of your industry overall to find undiscovered niches or under served markets.
Participating in Online Communities (10%)
This often has one of the highest rates of returns for informational/resource sites (including blogs). Find forums, blogs, social media sites, and other communities on the web where other industry folks gather. Simply by building a positive profile through your comments, posts, and participation, you can reap tremendous rewards in links, attention, and positive reputation. (Excellent advice here from SEOMoz – I’ve inserted the same word-for-word. )
Testing/Refining Based on Visitor Data (10%)
Another important task. Your visitor data, particularly if it provides visitor action tracking, can show you which links are most valuable, which keywords return the highest value, where to focus your advertising efforts, and how to get more visitors to “convert,” however that term may apply in your situation.
The act of analysis itself should be less than half the time you invest here. The other portion should be used to make changes to your site based on your theories of performance, test, analyze, refine, and repeat. Ad placement, button use, contextual clues, headlines, calls to action, and hundreds of other factors all play a role. Start experimenting and you’ll quickly learn what works for your particular audience.
Manual Link Building (5%)
The least important of all your activities. 95% of value-driven traffic will come from just a few dozen links that you’ll be able to acquire out of a few hundred. Pursue high-traffic, high-relevance links with fervor – devote a great deal of time and effort to obtaining the individual links that you believe will provide the greatest value, and don’t spend too much time on the rest.
Note that some folks will think differently about how one’s time requires to be spent on email marketing. no hard-and-fast rule exists for now – that’s why this is a good start to being with.
This is standard in terms of SEO. Naught appears to rag upon them compared to this.Interestingly, this is just what was forewarned about ten years ago at the last big blackhat about SEO in 1994.