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SEO - The basics - Looking for a guide or advice.

by extralink
6 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hi everyone,

I'm looking for a decent guide on SEO. There seem like so many different things to consider, so I'd like to see if there are any documents you recommend - free or paid - to learn what I need to do.

There are plenty of things I don't understand.

As an example, let's say I own the domain hatsfordogs .com (this is, clearly, completely made up). Do I need to worry about purchasing hundreds of other sites and linking to that domain?

Or, would it be worth having hundreds of different pages on hatsfordogs.com to catch people searching for "hats for dogs" - for example, hatsfordogs. com/los_angeles.html, with text on their "looking for hats for dogs in los angeles? We can help!" with a link to the main, index page?

I realise I could be shooting in completely the wrong direction, but if it's the latter (ie, hundreds of repetitive things), that's something I could do easily (programmer by trade, so writing software to do that would be simple).

My point is - I'm kind of lost. So I guess, back to my main question - is there anything I should read to learn this? I feel like it's the last missing piece of the puzzle that would help me plan forwards.

Thanks all.
#advice #basics #guide #seo
  • Profile picture of the author dmtaylor247
    Don't worry too much about links, focus on good content.

    Take for example a plumber in london and you want to build pages "plumbers surrey" "plumbers Essex" this is the sort of thing panda will kill you for if your content is not unique enough, it needs to be 100% unique.

    How the hell can you write about plumbers in Surrey? you can't really, you can't write about plumbing in an area unless it was junk content... or there is some amazing story about a plumber in Surrey...

    My idea is to take a different view on this, if you want to provide useful information then write about Surrey, is it a nice place? what's there? what's the shopping like? what's the parking like? the nightlife? and then put a small advert style paragraph at the end with your keywords and a link to your homepage with your main keyword or brand name "plumbers in london" - "londonplumber.com" - doing this you may even get some general traffic from people living in that area and next time they want to use your services they will remember you...
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    • Profile picture of the author extralink
      Thank you, that makes more sense. I assume, then, that panda is specifically designed to catch poor, repetitive content.
      This may seem like a strange question, then - but let's assume there was anothe rpage on my site (using your example), about essex (which, coincidentally, isn't that far away from me at all).
      What if my page contained quoted information from pages like wikipedia? Is that frowned on, too? I'm asking more out of interest than laziness (I promise).
      Thanks again, that's already been helpful.
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  • Profile picture of the author GodMode52
    There will always be some small % of similar content, nothing bad will happen for few quotes per page, but try to keep your content at least 80-90% unique.
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  • Profile picture of the author retsek
    This is probably the best beginner guide:
    SEO: The Free Beginner?s Guide From SEOmoz
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  • Profile picture of the author GeraldNitram
    SEOMoz's guide is already that good, but did you know that Google themselves has its own SEO guide for those who are starting up? You can check it out at the link I'll be sharing below. It's true that you have to focus more on the content rather than worrying about the links. That doesn't mean that you can completely disregard building links, though. One way of building links the right way would be posting them as a support to an idea you're pointing out, or as a support to the things posted on the page where you're going to post your link.

    Google's SEO Starter Guide
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    Be your own boss by becoming an SEO Reseller!
    A white label SEO firm can help you out so that you can start TODAY!
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  • Profile picture of the author smitholivia
    seomoz's beginners guide is best for seo basic.
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