If you try to use all the available SEO strategies, you wouldn’t have time for anything else in the day. With the growing complexity of the search engine algorithms, SEO has become a wide range of activities including link building, linkbaiting, social media, and onpage optimization. Today, it’s not enough to just pick the right keywords and optimize your meta tags.

PeterD over at SEO Book has an excellent post about using different SEO strategies for different sites. In his article, he contends that certain SEO strategies are more effective depending on the site. This principle is great for webmasters that don’t have time to do (or learn) all the SEO activities on a consistent basis.

First, he talks about the importance of setting goals. Your goals will play a big part in determining the best strategies for your site. For example, if you want to rank for a specific keyword, your best bet is to build links to a page that’s optimized for that keyword. If you want to increase your search traffic by 20%, then you should probably do keyword research to see if you’re actually targeting traffic generating keywords.

Next, he talks about the difference between SEO for new sites and established sites. This is very important, because these two types of sites are viewed very differently by the search engine bots. He advises on focusing on link building for new sites. It’s hard to rank for much of anything until you get a good number of quality links. On the other hand, established sites already have the links. Therefore, for established sites, PeterD says to focus more on the onpage factors like internal linking and content creation.

Finally, he gives his top five SEO activities:

1. Produce remarkable, attention grabbing content
2. Crawlability
3. Build links
4. Title tag
5. On-page content

Check out his post for more information. It includes many useful links so make sure to click through to them.