Where to start? + other beginner questions

Hello Jake, the answers I'm giving you is what I would do in your situation.

1) Since you are creating a new website from scratch in a local service niche, I can't stress enough how important keyword research is. Keyword research is actually what I recommend everyone do first when it comes to seo, because you have to know what keywords are out there and which ones you can rank for. Ranking for keywords is what determines whether or not your website gets traffic, and if you target keywords with a very high level of competition then your website will never rank.

2) What I recommend you do is have at least 5 pages of unique content on the site before you try to rank it. Each article has to be based around a certain low competition keyword, this is what maximizes your chances of ranking and getting traffic. I don't have much experience advertising websites like yours on social media, but I would just focus on seo if I were you.

3) Building up a lot of links in a very short amount of time can indeed trigger a penalty and hurt your site. However creating social media profiles and getting links from Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Deviant Art, Youtube, Vimeo etc etc.. is perfectly fine. As a matter of fact this is actually what I do for all of my new niche websites (minus flicker, deviant art, and vimeo )

Hope this helps.

Hi Ryan,

Many thanks for the reply, it's a great help.

I've now decided to drop my gallery and make that my blog page. I'll still upload images, but will do so as individual posts and write an article about each one at the same time, which should give me a lot more content and keep the website fresh. I'll be sure to look up which keywords aren't used as much and then include them in my articles.

That's also good that building up the social profiles won't hurt my site. I'm not quite sure if I'll use all of them yet, but I wanted to snap them up so as I have the option in the future.

If I were you I would keep things simple.

All you need to do are the following:

Make sure your on-page seo is good, dont use your keywords more than twice
next back links from authority pages with strong DA and PA
after that make sure you're your anchor text are varied, you need more branded links (ie your url and site name) than money keyword links

But primarily you need backlinks and make sure your page include the words you want to rank for that's it

Take my advice with a pinch of salt - I am not an SEO guru and whilst I have had some sites do well with my SEO efforts, I have had others never get off the ground.

From what you have said I would go counter to the popular advice here. Look to build up your social media efforts first and THEN SEO.

My logic is as follows...

Google wants sites to get their SERPs as organically as possible. If your social media has developed to a certain point they would assume that you will naturally start getting backlinks (rather than a site getting backlinks right off the bat).

On top of that a social media presence will help drive traffic that hopefully is interacting with your site. They will be able to see (because of Google analytics) that your bounce rate, time on site, etc, is already good and so trust you more.

In addition if your social media presence is good and your site worth linking to then you will probably end up getting natural links anyway, which will help.

SEO should, imo (and again I stress I am not an expert), be developed over time to look as natural as possible. Sure try get some good guest posts for links in, but don't go all out, develop your social media first, age your site, get a following, and build from a natural looking base.

And one more time, this is my opinion based on my own playing with SEO, and it is playing - proper experts may well have different advice.

My recommendation is to START and then start testing and analyzing. Starting with great content that can gain traction by itself is great because you can then start testing onsite strategies, keyword research and so on after you've got a great platform with link equity.

I always just get the stuff out there, with general onsite SEO and then optimize after the site has traction.