SEO and Zeus really worth it next to AdWords?

[denemante]

Hey all,

I own an online jewelry and diamond store. I've done some solid internal SEO, and feel as if it's very strong. The next step is getting backlinks. I'm looking to use Zeus.

Now I'm not at all afraid of hard work. However, I look at my competition and their (high) rankings. It seems to me that with such massive competition in my industry (there seem to be 1000s similar to me), I won't see any payoff from SEO unless I actually crack the top 10.

And given the feverish competition in my industry, I think it would take me a year of hours each day to even come close.

So I'm wondering if I should even continue on my SEO quest, or just skip it, and focus only on AdWords and PPC, and other marketing avenues.

Any input?

Thanks!

[saurabm]

there's nothing like free search traffic. try doing something different with your type of site.... since you're an online jewellery and diamond store, get about 500 high quality articles written on the different types of gemstones, accessories, etc ..... make sure they're HIGH CLASS, so that people actually want to link to it . Make a complete resources section.... In time, with zero SEO effort from your side, you'll see links coming in to your site like crazy ;) no doubt it'll take time and some serious effort, but in the long run, you'll win BIG :D Free one-way high quality incoming links by the thousands is something that even the most "hi-fi" SEO experts cannot achieve without getting a bit crazy in the head area :cool:

[seobook]

if your site has a good biz model you should be able to afford both adwords and organic SEO

as far as using automated software in the link building process I like using some tools to research a market, but I would always manually contact people I wanted links from and I never would use widespread link trading software to publish links to my sites

[denemante]

We actually have a definitive guide to buying diamonds that we wrote and have links to around our site. It's meant to be useful for our customers.

I could certainly write tons of quality stories, etc. and have them under a resources page.

But if other sites find those and link to them, they'll be linking to my resources page - not a page where I'm selling products. Thus, the pagerank of that page might be high, but I'd really like my product pages to be high.

Does that make sense?

[DarkMatter]

Well if you have a useful document such as your diamond buying guide, then people will reference it in forums and websites. This draws visitors, who are interested in purchasing diamonds, to your site. Assuming they can find your product pages from this guide, a certain percentage of them may purchase from you. Useful documents like that will also help your site to build authority from the inbound links, which in the long run will help you show up for related searches.

So even if your pr on the product pages is low, one very useful or unique document could drive enough traffic and sales to your site to make it profitable.

PS - while I would definitely have links from your guide to the marketplace part of your site...be careful not to overdo it or you will make the guide look like a big sales pitch and less people will link to it.

[saurabm]

right. your content pages would have high page rank...and would probably rank higher... and you want your product pages to instead rank higher ... but that's not a problem. you can always have a nice linking strategy in place once some of your pages start ranking high enough. Think of links on your content pages like free links from a dmoz page (with the difference that unlike dmoz where you have to struggle to get a link, with your own high PR/high ranking content pages, you can place as many links to your product pages as you want). make sense ?

[strategicrankings]

carefully place 'call to action' elements in the pages that are ranking high - even if they are not product pages - , test and test and test again and again.

SEO is a never ending story.