Reddit Goldmine

SEO ESSENTIAL READING

Initial Steps to building a website The articles above should help you with this. But here are some basic steps I recommend taking EARLY on in the process.
Market Research
  • Selecting a niche
  • Keyword research – google keyword planner
  • Selecting a domain
Building
  • Creating a silo’ed site map – do this by hand, be creative and really think about usability and the long term when you draw this up
  • Create titles for pages/posts article, have a long list of articles to write or get written
  • Find hosting
  • Buy a domain
  • Choose your CMS (wordpress)
  • Start writing and creating
  • Create a social presence
  • Link building

Balancing SEO practices I think it is important that you not get caught up in any one “SEO strategy.” So don’t just do link building, or don’t just do social media. You should think about your niche and then allocate resources accordingly.
For example, a law website is not going to have a ton of social media followers, who retweets a lawyer or loves reading their facebook posts? No one. I still have a social media presence, but I know link building and more targeted outreach are going to do more for me than hammering Instagram or facebook. To the contrary if I was starting a niche website selling selfie sticks, I would hammer Instagram and facebook all day. You just need to reflect on what your niche is, who your customers will be, and how you can engage them.

Allocating SEO efforts: As mentioned above, depending on your site, adjust these % accordingly.
  • 40% On-page SEO – CONTENT, internal links, breadcrumbs, schema/microdata
  • 20% Link building – This is the pillar of what google was founded on: citations from a reliable source suggest the cited source is reliable. Make your site a trusted website by getting high quality links.
  • 20% Social media – The kids love it, google does too. Learn to leverage it to your benefit. Incorporate time saving hacks like IFTTT which let you post to Instagram facebook twitter G+ all at once.
  • 10% Page optimization – Speed is one of the few things I can control in the SEO world. Since I can control it, I am going to do the best job I can to optimize my sites. Here is a screenshot of my site's performance today. To get there I had to do tons of tweaking AND move hosts which was a big pain. But now I don’t have to worry about speed being an SEO factor, that lets me focus on other things such as content creation and link building.
  • 10% Experiment – Try new techniques, test landing pages, try new ideas. Make an infographic, create a troll social media account to drive traffic to your site. Mix it up, most likely your efforts will yield little but you may discover an absolute gold mine. So much of SEO is sadly all about fads. Once the fad is known it doesn’t work anymore (that doesn’t mean 1000 people wont try and sell you a service leveraging that fad). Create your own private fad and win. Get creative, lets say you have an affilliate site that sells power tools. Instead of marketing to contractors you try a campaign where you pin pictures of attractive men holding power tools linked back to your affiliate site around fathers day. Lo and behold all the moms on pinterest come to your site because of the hot guy and decided it would be good to get their husband a power tool because they felt guilty and you reminded them fathers day is 2 weeks away. (Crazy Idea, but you get my point---BE CREATIVE).

PILLARS OF A GOOD WEBSITE
  • Organized – Easy to use/navigate
  • CONTENT – relevant, unique, hand-written and USEFUL content
  • Fast – slow kills in the SEO wold, see my speed comments above

TOOLS I USE

ESSENTIAL WORDPRESS PLUGINS: It took me a long time to find these guys. I love these tools they make my website better, faster and more usable. Honestly, I would have paid someone to give me this list 6 months ago. The amount of time and energy these plugins save is amazing.
  • Yoast SEO – better than all in one, I was reluctant to make the switch but glad I did
  • Table of Contents Plus – Long articles should have a table of contents this helps a ton
  • WP Twitter Autopost – All my posts are automatically tweeted. I have a daisy chain to my FB/G+ as well. You can also use IFTTT for this.
  • W3 Total Cache – I’m obsessed with seed. Use this.
  • Breadcrumb NavXT – Google and users like breadcrumbs, you should too
  • Use Google Libraries – Speeds up load times, loads jQuery from googles servers not yours = faster.

Conclusion As they say, time is money. I hammered this out over a couple hours this morning. I may try to fix typos and formatting but really the substance is there. I hope someone finds this helpful. If you have questions I am happy to give my thoughts. I also hope other people chime in.

Anyone who responds, share a resource or a link you use regularly. It will make this thread a valuable reference going forward!
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Given there's another spam submission in this sub reddit, I'd like to see a REAL list of the top 15 SEO tools.
I'll start by adding Moz, market samurai, Google keyword research tool and raven.
Do you agree these are in the top 15 and what else should be included in the REAL top 15 SEO tools list?
[edit - started the list below - let me know what else should be in there]
  • Google keyword research tool
  • Google analytics
  • Google webmaster tools
  • Moz
  • Market Samurai
  • Raven
  • FeedTheBot
  • Majestic SEO
  • Advanced Web Ranking
  • SEM Rush
  • Cemper's link research tools
  • Übersuggest
  • Cognitive SEO
  • SEO Site Checkup
  • Brightedge
  • Mondovo
  • KeywordShitter
  • Xovi
  • Open Link Profiler
  • Scrape Box
  • Search Metrics
  • Screaming Frog
  • Hittail
  • Serpbook
  • KWFinder
  • Ahrefs
  • Excel (for storing, recording, analysing, planning everything)
  • [add your suggestion below and I'll include it]
[Edit 2 this is now larger than 15 but keep the suggestions coming and I'll categorise them into on-page SEO, new/existing content, and off-site SEO. I could include social promotion tools too if you think these count as SEO tools these days? e.g. followerwonk, buzzsumo amongst many others]
[Edit 3 - here's the categorised list - there are some prices missing where I couldn't find them/haven't used them]
Keyword Research/Competition Analysis/Pre-content Creation
  • Google keyword research tool (free)
  • Market Samurai
  • KeywordShitter (free)
  • KWFinder
  • SEM Rush (from $69pcm)
  • Übersuggest (free)
  • Hittail (from $10pcm)
(also Mondovo and others)
On-page SEO/Keyword focusing/Page health checks/Internal Linking
  • Google analytics (free)
  • Google webmaster tools (free)
  • Moz (from $99pcm) (some stuff also available free)
  • Raven (from $99pcm)
  • FeedTheBot (free)
  • Cognitive SEO (from $99pcm)
  • SEO Site Checkup (free or from $19pcm)
  • Brightedge (price not listed - means bespoke and expensive pricing - can anyone confirm the price?)
  • Mondovo (free trial, unknown price as yet - discovering - if anyone else knows, let me know)
  • Xovi (from €94pcm)
  • Screaming Frog (free or £99 per year)
  • Search Metrics (couldn't find price - anyone got a price?)
(also Cemper's link research tools and others)
Rank Tracking
  • Advanced Web Ranking (from $49pcm)
  • Serpbook (from $5pcm)
(also Market Samurai, Cognitive SEO, Mondovo and others)
Link Building/Off-page SEO
  • Majestic SEO (free with multiple upgrades all the way up to £1000pcm)
  • Cemper's link research tools (from €99pcm)
  • Open Link Profiler (free)
  • Scrape Box ($97 one-off)
  • Ahrefs (from free up to $499pcm)
(also Mondovo and others)
Organisation & Planning
  • Excel or Google Spreadsheets (for storing, recording, analysing, planning everything)

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