Brick & Mortar "Upgrade Path"

[mattlwil]

I have an old high school friend of mine (I'm 33 now LOL) that started a pest control business first of this year (2010). So this campaign will just be targeted for local queries only.

Anyway, he has a website. Keywords 'pest control' are not in the domain name or company name. Domain was just registered first of the year. I was trying to come up with a game plan which we could start with. The website is a Vista Print template site so I am not familiar with what kind of webmaster privileges we have. This will be started purely from scratch. No kind of SEO has been done at all.

Here is the plan I have so far:

Optimize website Title <60 characters, Description <150 characters.
Find out if h1 tags can be created.
Some kind of search engine submission, manual, automatic? Not sure which is best?
Sign up for Google, Yahoo!, Bing Local listing. Obtain 100% profiles on all.
Sign up for Google, Yahoo!, Bing webmaster. Register both domains with and without w w w. Setting w w w as preferred. Is Google the only one that does this?
Set up domain based email. Is this necessary or would a Yahoo! email suffice? This would be for the purpose of link building in the future.
Put name of company with 'pest control' in title of local listings. Will listing get slapped?
Sign up for Adwords. Just for indexing purposes.
Install Analytics code.
Generate robots .txt and sitemap .xml. Is this necessary for a small site?
Submit site to DMOZ.

How's that for starers? Any thing you all would like to add?

I have done some keyword research and it looks like pest control with city of business is a good one. If we start link building with this keyword that is the ONLY keyword we can target for the domain? Should we create a url with pest control in the anchor text just in case we wanted to target other keywords in the future?

The only back linking strategies I have so far is scraping other websites ranking for pest control keyword and submitting to the link directories they use. And searching for keyword "notify me of follow up comments" and looking for blogs to post on that do follow links.

There is another forum that I am going to ask more specific questions about back linking though if that's not appropriate here.

Everything I know about SEO is just what I have read over the past 4 months. I have not even started to learn the social bookmarking, article submission, rss feed etc. I am just purely interested in Local serps right now.

Thanks for reading.

[thesweetspot]

Optimize website Title <60 characters, Description <150 characters.-This is good, make sure to have the keywords in the both and not keyword stuff in the description, you only need it once.

Find out if h1 tags can be created.-this part, use your related keywords variation.
Some kind of search engine submission, manual, automatic? Not sure which is best?I use scrubtheweb.com and i also will submit to top 3 search engines manually.

Sign up for Google, Yahoo!, Bing Local listing. Obtain 100% profiles on all.-Perfect, be sure you optimize correctly and look for adding pics and videos for that completeness.

Sign up for Google, Yahoo!, Bing webmaster. Register both domains with and without w w w.
Setting w w w as preferred. Is Google the only one that does this?-Good-registering both domain names.

Set up domain based email. Is this necessary or would a Yahoo! email suffice? This would be for the purpose of link building in the future.-Get both, but when submitted throughout the internet locally or nationally it is more professional with business domain based email then free based, but I would get both yahoo, business based, and gmail.

Put name of company with 'pest control' in title of local listings. Will listing get slapped?-Possibly in the future bc this comes down to quality guidelines, and google states that you are to add only the org/business name in the name of company area. you can always file a dba to get past this, and if they say anything, shoot them a screenshot of the legal paperwork saying that is the name of the company.

Sign up for Adwords. Just for indexing purposes.-Very smart for two reasons, for indexing but also because you now will receive 100 free in adwords credit for your client to do more testing...you can tell him this is a bonus you were able to get for him and he will be REALLY HAPPY.

Install Analytics code.-Smart as well.. I also recommend HeatMap...there is a free account you use to get started.Also if client is paying you and this site is direct response related, you can use google optimizer...VERY FUN TOOL.

Generate robots .txt and sitemap .xml. Is this necessary for a small site?-Always do this for search engines regardless of the size of the site...you do plan on growing the site as money comes in and the business grows, right?

Submit site to DMOZ.-Very good.

My recommendation..Use these local listing sites and anyone else who needs this...use these

local listing sites..it helps in the organic business listing results:
citysearch
local yahoo
insiderpages
yellowpages
supermedia
webapp.com
bridgat.com
ExpressUpdateUSA
yellowbot.com
merchantcircle.com
hotfrog.com
kudzu.com
bestoftheweb
local.com
yelp

Do this over a 1-3 week period..you want to grow it slowly. As more competitors come on broad, you will be able to show google that you have more votes.

I hope this helps you in your local internet marketing...Just so you know stay tuned for my local marketing product...If you liked this advice...you will love what I am launching..!!!

[Colossal]

I think that's a pretty holistic game plan. However, what do you plan to do for on page content? i mean now that you have a game plan for how the SEs will find your website, but what are they going to find?

DMOZ submission will depend on this as they are quite stringent. I would suggest submitting when you're about 85% complete as the queue takes forever and they don't allow "under construction" websites.

Let us know how it goes! Also remember to track!

[thesweetspot]

Yes,, track with an excel sheet. And have on page content and titles are very important, very important..

let us know how it goes.

[Liquidgraph]

Plan looks good, for content i'd write or hire someone to write at least 20 or so 500-1000 word articles related to pest control. I prefer 1000 word articles, they look much less spammy. You could get that done for a couple hundred on elance or just write yourself (I hate writing). For the article Titles make sure you use the keywords you are trying to hit, in the titles. Then go pay 80 bucks for a joe118's packet or something basic like that and link the articles! and bam your off to a good start.

[mattlwil]

Thanks for the input.


I have no idea what to do for content. I understand on page optimization and have tried to set up everything correct for that.

When I start reading about articles, RSS feeds, social bookmarking I start to get confused. I am doing link building by submitting to link directories and posting on blogs. Do I need to bookmark every link I create?

I have started an Excel file listing all the links created. I've only got about 60 or so links indexed with Yahoo! right now.

Thanks