I'm interested in improving the rankings of my site, and I'm wondering where the best place is to put budget... Content? Links? Press? Very interested to know what the community thinks. Thanks!
First of all do an SEO audit by yourself or try some paid tools like Alexa SEO audit.<p>Based upon audit report invest your money where you lag.
Backlinks and On Page SEO settings are thing where most people lack.<p>Backlinks are highly important to rank. So try to hire quality writers and try to post some guest post on various blogs related to your niche.<p>Invest few amount of money and time in improving on page SEO parameters of your site.
Hey so I do this full time on a very professional high level. I love HN but MOST of the advice you will find in here is hands down awful.<p>The truth is that the real answer is going to be heavily dependent on where you currently are, what your resources are and what your competition is like.<p>Reach out to me at mark [at] afterwire.com.au and I would be happy to point you in the right direction. Not that I am trying to sell you in anyway but I have a special passion about people not getting screwed over with questionable advice in an industry filled with "self described experts".
You want to have lots of links so you rank high, but you can't do that by buying links. They're fairly worthless. A good alternative is all the linking you get from press, guest posts on external sites (though I feel like that ship has probably sailed since when I found it effective a few years back), and generally making sure there's a lot of organic seeming backlinks to an array of sites with diversity in anchor text as well.<p>So if I had $5k now to spend:<p>0. Do an audit or have someone do an audit to see that you're not screwing something up completely.
1. AdWords, if you know that you convert well enough to turn a profit.
2. Internal content stuff: a blog, whitepapers, whatever.
3. External content stuff: 20 backlinks on >PR3 sites should move the needle for sure.<p>$5k may also do nearly nothing at all depending on what you're trying to rank for. Even medium-sized eCommerce folks probably spend $20k a month on getting backlinks from external sites.
Focus on traffic--not rankings.<p>You or an employee should become super familiar with Google Analytics (or another package) and Google Webmaster Tools. You need to measure traffic and make sure your site is being crawled. This is also the best info you will get on rankings.<p>I hesitate to tell you where to spend $5k. Investing in people would be best. The best solution I could give is to buy the traffic through AdWords.<p>Do not buy links.<p>Content is important. Make sure your Title tags are good. But content is close to your core business so I wouldn't necessarily throw $5K at it.<p>Not sure how you would buy press.<p>Xenu link sleuth is a great tool.
<i>o</i> Fix all broken internal links. Xenu's Link Sleuth is good program (and a hilarious name).<p><i>o</i> Never remove old pages, just update them. This prevents braking incoming backlinks.<p><i>o</i> Take a look at letsencrypt.org. (Avoid halfway-HTTPS like CloudFlare etc)<p><i>o</i> (etc)<p>Cover all the basics and keep the money.