Questions From A Seo Rookie, a couple questions from a green SEO wannabe

[Goldman1]

Hello Everyone!

I am a relative rookie to the SEO field. I am in my first real job since graduating college with a Marketing and English degree. My current position is the "Marketing Guru" for a relatively small HR consulting firm. Part of my duties include an emphasis on search engine optimization and surprise surprise my marketing education contained no mention of SEO (pretty standard I guess?).

I've been reading the forum here at High Rankings for the past month and can't thank you all enough for all the information you provide that I've been soaking up. You guys are Awesome! I've got a couple of quick questions that I didn't find immediate answers to on the other forums and am hoping somebody here can offer their suggestions.

1. I have the google link toolbar installed and when I run it on our homepage it shows up nothing. We have a number of links floating around out there on other sites relating to our line of business. However I place a space after the "link:" and google finds a number of links to my site. Is this something I should be concerned about? Am I missing out on link popularity pts. with the search engines?

2. I have been writing a number of content rich articles about our services and tools we use. These are currently being placed on a BLOG outside of our site's domain with links pointing back to our site. Would it be wise to also host these articles w/in our website's domain for search engine visibility?

3. I know that our site is being indexed by Google (two days ago actually), but some of the pages that have been there for at least a month are not found when I enter http://www.website.com/address/etc copied from the address bar of the page. Does this mean that these pages are not being indexed by Google? There are links to from w/in the domain. Would a sitemap be the best solution?

4. Lastly, I have been placing links to our site on a number of business relevant company directory listing sites. Does Google consider these link farms? I am not link to these sites. I've also been posting articles to a number of free article directories for syndication as suggested by one of the forum moderators, will this make these articles more difficult to find on my site for SEs if I have the same article in a number of places in cyberspace.

Thanks in advance for any responses, and for all of you out there sharing your valuable knowledge and experience on a daily basis. It is so very much appreciated. I appologize if my questions are stupid, I am quite green...

 

[AudioEdition]

Hi Goldman,
Welcome to the world of marketing. I have worked in different marketing positions a lot in my life, and it can be a demanding occupation. You have to do your own research, start your own projects, and sometimes invent the product itself
I'm new to SEO as well, and only doing this as a sideline. That being said, I think a sitemap is a must. You can better check what pages are listed, etc by entering a "site: www.whatever.com " search. There are many places that will make you a sitemap for free, and indexing is much more efficient with them.
A few links might not be enough. Really popular sites have 5, 6, 7 figures linking in (that's up to millions)
If you are operating with some resources, why not create your own directories, industry resources, etc. Won't cost you much, and can be done easily if you have an industry database already.
Also, is the HTML itself properly SEO'd? Good short titles, well done meta tags, etc. Not that I think it matters all that much now days
Hope this helps. Remember, content and usability is king, if people like or use the site, links will appear on their own.