Best SEO practice when you cannot add articles to website

Welcome to "real world" SEO.

Real world SEO shares a lot of the same principles, but is a lot different than IM'ers SEO methods. Most real businesses are not going to be okay with you just adding a bunch of unneeded content to their website so that you can cram in a few keywords.

And to be honest, you shouldn't need to.

I have several projects where the client is targeting 25-100 keywords for their home page and no more than 2-3 of them show up on the homepage, if any at all. Many of the sites have no more than 300 words of content on the homepage either.

Your initial thought is correct. Backlinks are key, but you need to put a stronger emphasis on high quality backlinks, no crappy Scrapebox blasts, SEnuke services, etc.

If you do not have high PR sites of your own to use, you might want to look at buying some links. You are also going to want to start reaching out to webmasters and looking for guest blog opportunities on high PR sites.

Is your client looking for local SEO rankings or more national/global?

Even though I would suggest your client to add a blog to his site (all big companies have a blog on their site) there are many things you can do, here are 3 that I believe are the best!

Guest Posting
The best option not only for SEO but most importantly for traffic and increased conversion rates is guest posting on authority blogs on the niche of your client. In that way you will get high PR backlinks on the body of the articles (usually at the byline) which will bring a lot of traffic from the moment that they get published (of course you need top quality articles "this is not article marketing") additionally if your articles are informative readers will like to learn more and they will be easy buyers for your client.

Video Marketing
The next thing you can do is video marketing you can either convert articles to videos or make them just promotional (you can find a lot cheap but quality video creation services here on warrior for hire) then you can upload them on video sharing sites

the most popular are Youtube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Metacafe etc. Youtube is probably the most important since it has the most traffic and Google owns it. The basic SEO for videos is to have your keyword inside your title (preferably on the beginning) write a description with 50-100 words and use 2-3 times your keywords, and write variations of your keyword on the video tags. A simple trick that you can use to get more views is to search for popular videos that are relevant to your video and create a video response with your own video (you can find this next to comments of every video on Youtube) Of course you should add one link in the beginning of the description.

Blog commenting
Another thing you can easily do is blog commenting on high traffic and pagerank blogs, in order to get the most of blog commenting you should search for commentluv or keywordluv enabled blogs in your clients niche in that way you can add your keywords together with your name...

I would say, make sure that the front page has at least 500 - 600 words on it for starters.

make sure the on page SEO is 100% on point before you do any backlinking. Build links slowly at first, to make sure you dont get the site sandboxed then ramp it up over a few weeks / months.

They will not allow a subdomain blog? blog.domain.com?

Either way you could always create your own site that links with anchor text links to that website one way on a separate host. Even if you were to purchase high PR backlinks the backlinks from your site would help it rank.

1- Publish content at Parent Website (The Platform you wish to create a link wheel for)

2- Create lenses, hubs, webs or tumbls at squidoo, lenses, hubs, webs or tumblr. (Put Anchor Text respectively).

3- Submit Articles to directories such for instance Ezine, Sooperarticles etc (Use one link from parent website and others from web 2.0)

4- Submit these links to Social Bookmarking Sites like Reddit, Digg and Delicious etc.

5- Use those links at Social Networks as well if you have good presence specially at LinkedIn.

Create backlinks by using informative contents among others.

Publish posts at guest blogging sites. this will give you back links as well as good traffic

Here's a thought. Don't take clients. Especially don't take clients
when you have no clue as to how to start.

Some crazy answers here, guest blogging, blog commenting,
social bookmarking, etc. just a bunch of junk BS.

I can't understand how people part with their money to hire people
who have no clue. Must be nice.

You don't need to promote a new site. You can decline.
Which is what you should do when having no clue.

Paul

LOL,

You should also have assumed that backlinks will mean,

commenting on other sites
submitting articles to ezines
creating web 2.0 sites
guest blogging to link back to your clients site
social media bookmarking and sharing

etc etc. So, you already have the answer!