The following is an SEO and link-building plan I wrote for a wine-making Web site:

This plan will attempt to gain links with diverse link text in order to improve the Web site's Google ranking and in effect eventually improve on goal performance. These links will prove vital as it will rely on user submissions to keep the content fresh.

20 targeted keyword possibilities using Google AdWords

home wine brewing wine making recipes

homemade wine recipes make your own wine

home winemaking home wine making

wine making instructions making homemade wine

making your own wine wine making recipe

homemade wine making make your own wine

how to make wine homebrew wine

easy wine making make wine

fruit wine making wine making tips

home made wine making how to make wine at home

Final Targeted Keywords

making homemade wine

making your own wine

wine making recipes

homemade wine

homebrew wine

Many simple terms such as wine alone have many, many times the hit that more focused terms have, but these shouldn't be included because someone searching this is not necessarily (or even likely) to be interested in making their own wine.

Text link plan

1. Shoot out some press releases promoting the site on Twitter. The press releases will be on a landing page. Find the most active keywords tags and find what people are using. Research says #wine #winemaking would probably hit interested people. The wine group has a huge number of people tweeting but is less focused. Nonetheless, if a small percentage of the #wine followers are interested, this could be a successful way to reach people.
   
   

2. Forums and comments on blogs, articles, etc. Leave a sig anywhere you go online. Plan to get active on established forums to drop a sig that will link to the site. But, I think it is important to add quality responses on sites rather than being all spammy and just putting it all over the place. Provide a useful/knowledgeable answer to questions and drop the url with the answer. If it is a blog with commenting, comment on the piece and drop the url. Gain additional effect by putting a quality answer out there. If people see a knowledgeable response, they may visit and complete one of the site's goals. Furthermore, attach the url to a profile page on many of these sites. It is best to find sites that do not have “no follow” links, but this is getting increasingly difficult.

These sites are some top brewing sites as far as Google ranking for this topic. They seem to receive a lot of comments, so this is an active community of targeted users at these sites: http://beeradvocate.com http://forum.northernbrewer.com/
http://www.brew-wineforum.com/ http://www.brewingkb.com
http://www.winemakingtalk.com/forum/
This will provide links from an established site of similar content. These are considered quality sites by Google, so links from these sites will be more valuable than links from just any old site.

Using the words from my targeted keyword searches as link text. These are some examples, but find more than just these sites.

1. Place link on social network profiles such as MySpace and Facebook. Post a message that links to the site.

2. It's never a bad idea to ask a couple of people running sites or blogs for a mention or a link of some sorts. Contact a few sites or blogs to see if they can help out. Also exchanging links with other sites if possible.

3. Added site to wine making Google Group. Join Yahoo! wine making group. Post messages on board with url and also had e-mail sent to promote site to members of the board.

On-site improvements

• Improving keyword density on site, shooting for somewhere around 10 percent.

• Getting keywords in title tags and headers, mainly h1 and h2.

• Adding links to other useful resources of similar content in sidebar of links. Appealing for people to link to the site.

• Consider adding a module that posts the latest additions to the site. Change the anchor text so it is better than just “read more.” It should read something like “read more about brewing beer.” It's important to hit targeted keywords in the link text.

• Begin a blog to try to share some fun brewing stories or information. Hopefully this will provide a point of interest for people. Furthermore, promote the blog on some of these forum sites with a link, and try to direct people from the blog to my goal page.

SERP/visitor flow site map

I expect nearly all of the traffic will come in to the home page or landing page. The goal is to get them to register and to go to the “submit a recipe” page. I have placed a module on the top right of each page to try to guide people to page where you can submit a recipe. I am also planning to link from my blog to the submit page. This way all pages lead to the goal one way or the other.

Add breadcrumbs to the footer to provide more links within the site.

Submit xml site map to Google.

James Lambert is a Vermont newspaper editor, more specifically the design editor at the Rutland Herald. He is also an MSIT student at Marlboro College and enjoys developing Web sites and SEO. He blogs here from time to time about these topics.