The Art of SEO, 4th Edition

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Promoting Your Site and Obtaining Links

The first steps in SEO are getting your website optimized and search friendly, getting your SEO toolset configured and operational, and creating a spreadsheet of researched and refined keywords that you want to target. Once you have completed these steps you have completed much of the SEO puzzle, but not all of it. You also need to think about how you want to promote your business and establish your organization as a leader in your topical domain or market areas on the web.

The mechanics of increasing search traffic are rarely understood by people who aren’t in the industry. This is one of those aspects of SEO where traditional brick-and-mortar marketing tactics are often ineffective, which can make it difficult to steer your organization or client in the right direction. The goal isn’t to “get anyone in the door and hope they stick around and buy something.” Similarly, from a link-building perspective, the goal isn’t to get any link you can. Instead, you need to be thinking about how your promotional strategies create a presence for you on the web that establishes you as a leader in your market space.

To do this, you’ll want to identify the other leaders in your market—some will be competitors, but you should also look at media organizations that cover the space, significant customers, government and educational sites that touch your space, related suppliers, etc. Through the process of mapping all the related parties, you’ll ...