Please critique my SEO plan

[AllThePieces]

Hi all,

My business partner and I are trying to come up with SEO plan to help get out of no-where land.

Any advice you can share would be greatly appreciated.

thanks in advance.



Objective: To create an on-going SEO strategy

Problem: http://www.allthepieces.com is not being recognized at all for most, if not all, of our strongest keywords.

Keywords include: wedding, invitations, wedding invitations, save the date cards, wedding ceremony programs, thank you cards, bridal shower cards, baby shower cards, quinceanera invitations, stationery

Solution/Plan:
1) Continue to maintain reciprocal links pages at: http://www.allthepieces.com/Information.aspx
No more than 50 links per page, only wedding and event planning links allowed. All exchanged links will be done manually and no automatic submissions.

Questions: What is a number of links to strive for? We currently have about 100 reciprocal links. Is 250 enough? 500 enough? Is there a point where too many links hurt us?

2) Continue to submit to directories. At this point we have submitted to at least 100 directories – both wedding specific and general.

Questions: Again, is there a number of directories to strive for? We will continue to check back and see if our site is actually being listed, but what is a healthy number of directories to strive for? How effective are the small directories? Should we fork over some $$ for a paid listing? If so, where should we try, and how much can we expect to pay?

3) Begin submitting press releases.

Questions: I have a list of about a dozen free press release sites, how effective are these compared to the paid press release sites? I don’t particularly care if anyone really reads the press releases, this is purely for site optimization. When we write press releases, is it harmful to release the same text on several sites?

4) Begin submitting industry related articles with links to our site.

Question: Again, When we write articles, is it harmful to release the same text on several sites?


5) Begin blogging - start two industry related blogs with plenty of links to our site.




What else are we not thinking of? What else might help. Any suggestions whatsoever will help.

Can anyone speak positively about pay-per-click? I tried it once with a very restricted budget and did not feel it increased the number of orders placed.

Thanks again everyone. I really appreciate it!

[Duncan Pollock]

Not having taken the time to visit your site, I hesitate to remind you of the point that numerous SEO experts make, but I will!
Apart from anything else, a satisfying web position depends to a quite overwhleming degree on CONTENT.
Increasing links, etec., etc., is fine in itself, but does your site say things better / more completely / with greater originality / etc / than any of its competitors?
Your objective should, to my mind, be to make your pages, in effect, the obvious authority for people interested in finding what you produce. Achieve this and, as with the maker of a beter mousetrap, people will flock to your (search position) door.

Duncan

[Faglork]

Thanks Duncan for putting this straight.


AllThePieces: You talk about "SEO strategy". SEO = "Search Engine Optimization". Yet you seem to not even consider the main point:

"Can the SE spiders easily read (and understand) the content of our pages?"

If this fails, all your other efforts are close to useless (from an SEO perspective).

Example: On your starting page, after 17 kb of - for a spider - useless code comes a tiny 180 BYTE (!!!!!) paragraph of content ... all the rest is pure presentation, a heavy dose of javascript, graphis without ALT and TITLE attributes etc. There is not a single headline in the whole page.

You treat your content as if it were of almost no value. So how do you think the SE's are going to interpret this?

hth,
faglork

[amar]

Hi,

Content plays a vital role to get listed in major search engines. Your site dotn have enough content. Develop some static html pages with keyword rich content. Try to do more manual submissions to directories. Dont go for any paid submissions.

Thanks,
Amar

[Mr. Pants]

Hello all:

While you're creating optimized content, you might want to consider the competitiveness (is that even a word?) of your keywords. For example, "wedding" brings up 115 million competing pages in Google. Pretty hard to place on that term. Some of your more specific terms, such as "wedding ceremony programs," bring up a far more palatable 2.2 million. And you're still getting "wedding" in there. The only issue then is finessing your content so the keyword sounds natural.

And that's my 2 cents. Good luck!

[Faglork]

Very good advice. It makes perfect sense to write your texts around a "central topic" (for want of a better word) and use your keywords/key phrases wisely.

You might try to use Overture's "keyword assistant" to aid you. Not perfect, but helpful:

http://tinyurl.com/dwlyu

hth,
faglork

[KeithO]

I gotta agree with the overgenerality of the keywords selected. Weddings will encompass showers, dresses, cakes, locations, planners, catering, et all. You'll need to specify your keywords more.

2nd, you seem to be focused entirely on off site optimizing. Your site lacks effective use of the title tag, substantial content, and instead of photoshop resizing your images you are using html which distorts the quality and increases load time.

Onsite optimizing should be your 1st focus. Then start going to outside with developing links, writing articles, etc. Also make sure you are publishing your articles and press releases on your Web site to increase its content and freshness.

[AllThePieces]

Thanks all for the tips. I guess it should go without saying I'm a designer first and a developer second. While I do know my way around html, its a pretty basic understanding. To me, and my customers, its more important how I present my product. Of course, this is not going to get me anywhere in the listings. I know that. But our site was developed by someone else and now we're left to maintain it...which is why I'm looking for help.

faglork you wrote:
Example: On your starting page, after 17 kb of - for a spider - useless code comes a tiny 180 BYTE (!!!!!) paragraph of content ...

What paragraph are you referring to? And how much can it be expanded?

I'm definitely going to create an article section on the site, consider all your keyword suggestions and get writing. Thanks again!

[Faglork]

Originally Posted by AllThePieces

faglork you wrote:
Example: On your starting page, after 17 kb of - for a spider - useless code comes a tiny 180 BYTE (!!!!!) paragraph of content ...

What paragraph are you referring to?

A unique selection of wedding invitations, baby shower and bridal shower 
        invitations, 
birth announcements, party invitations, thank you cards and 
        much more!

... this is the whole content of the page (apart from the links) as seen by a spider.

faglork

[AllThePieces]

A million thanks faglork! I'm going to adjust that right now.

[aaron2005]

1.) Build a great website and link to it from your other sites or a few related sites just to get it visited, crawled, indexed and a bit of PR.

2.) Leave the site alone until you see visual PR then get back to work, but remember that speed kills. Isn't it true that if you serve up tons of pages to google they will expect the same frequency? What happens when you stop?

3.) Try hard to not follow what the latest so called "experts" are doing, they might be dragging a very heavy iron ball that is clamped to their legs.

AND I could be completely wrong so please do not do what I say, find your Zen place and go there for answers.