Chris
I'm of the mindset that practicing what some call Holistic
SEO is the way to go. This means everything stems from quality content, intelligently organized. This is decidedly unsexy, non-black hat optimization that stresses on page elements, site architecture, bot crawl path, and the usual slow and steady backlink building process. We have a leg up in that our domain has existed for a decade, with thousands of relevant and time-tested (ie not popped up overnight) backlinks. Within our fairly small niche, we are a strong brand so people tend to naturally link to us on enthusiast sites, forums, and industry related sites.
In a pm, I'll tell you which 2 recent books are the most valuable. Most print stuff on
SEO is woefully outdated or too basic to get anywhere.
As you know, the efficacy of organic/natural search for driving web sales depends in part on what you are selling, competition, length of sales cycle, seasonality etc. For us, we receive a TON of traffic for phrases like 'boat paint' or 'epoxy resin', but those phrases don't necessarily directly convert customers. No different than someone who is looking at getting a new television set and googles 'hdtv' or similar info-gathering-level phrase vs searching for a specific tv, part number etc. For us, product level phrases work much better, but obviously have less volume and sometimes less competition. The real win for us in the long tail. The smaller volume phrases that convert really well. Our site has 50,000 skus, so there's a ton of opportunity for this.
You are right, there are a zillion alleged
SEO pros out there. At least half of them are garbage. They'll tell you things like 'we'll get you on the first page of the results/#1 ranking guaranteed!'. Run away from *anyone* who promises you anything specific within a small time frame. Look for
SEO firms who have worked with database driven sites in competitive industries, look for case studies. If you think you've found someone you are interested in, fwd me their address and I'll take a look if you like.
Ranking doesn't mean anything unless there's a corresponding, trackable, and documented $ improvement. As far as terms to optimize for, check your internal site search logs, your competitors sites, use the adwords tool to analyze deep pages, subcategories, and category level pages on your site etc.
Link building sucks. Try to get something on meta filter, digg, or some other social/news type site. Are you a linkedin member? I think your profile can display a link. Same with facebook. Not sure if they specify no-follow on either.
Do you have a blog for each site? Start a blog, and in posts link to important parts of your site, varying the link text whenever possible. This is a great way to get deep parts of your site crawled. Get your blog linked within all possible networks. As its' not obviously commercial, sometimes blog links are easier to obtain. Wikipedia was a great source for 'authority' level backlinks, but people abused it and no bots don't see those links. .org .edu. and .gov backlinks carry more authority than .com or .net sites. Are there any you could target?
Do you have an XML sitemap that google can see (see webmaster tools under your google account)?
What kind of analytics package are you using?
And finally, do not think of
SEO vs paid search. I know there are some on here who hate paid searchh but...Adwords sometimes has a leg up because you have control of the landing page, your visibility, and the creative. You can spend thousands of dollars with an
SEO expert with no guaranteed results, but you can monitor your ROI from Adwords almost in real time. We will spend $400k with google alone this year with a 200,000+ keyword inventory, and track everything a million different ways. AOV, conversion rate, cost per conversion, gross profit, avg gp for visitors referred by each phrase, lifetime value etc.
You can even run a script on your site to display a contact phone # corresponding to the referring search engine/search engine campaign etc if you want to grab a few 800 numbers.
I could go on and on but I won't because I'm getting sidetracked and am out the door in a minute anyway. Please let me know if any of this is helpful or too obvious/idiotic.
Dan