SEO newbie with question...

Hi there.... I've just been given the task of "owning" the SEO initiative at my company. As a marketing executive I've done a reasonable amount of reading on SEO in the past - but lack the practical experience.

Here's my situation:

- The SEO initiative at our company is relatively urgent, and I'd like to get started ASAP, but an imminent site re-design will be happening soon (that will be done with SEO principles in mind), that is holding me up.

- My question is this: Is there anything I can do in the meantime (apart from working on guideline requirements, etc) that can help kick off the SEO initiative?

Maybe create some linking relationships in the short term and them have the link partners change the URL that the link points to after new pages are created for the new site?...or would this just be too time consuming changing the links afterwards? Is there anything else I can do at the moment?
ie: Registering new search friendly domain names and have them point to our site, etc, etc...?

Any help would be much appreciated...

Mike.

It's very rarely a good idea to try and build links before the site is ready; you double your chances (already 99%*) of being seen as a spammer, and thus wipe out the chances of link building when the site is ready to go.

Much better to invest in making sure that there's not only plenty of content on day one - but also a program of adding more; a thriving site is much easier for link building, the link-builders tell me.

If quick results are needed upon launch, then investing in Adwords is the short answer. 'Advertising' is the longer version

It's also worth letting the rumour slip out that SEO and miracle working are different things; miracles don't come cheap**

Good Luck!

*lousy math, but you get the point!

**unless you are a saint, in which case they're free on the 2008 tariff.

it wil also help massively if you can learn HTML. SEO is part onsite, part offsite. You'll no doubt be fine at the offsite (link building, associations, adwords etc), but you'll need to know how the pages should be formatted and coded in order to present them best. Developers and some web designers (who will no doubt be redoing your site) are notoriously bad at this, unless told specifically to do it. Even though you say the site will be done with SEO in mind, it will need regular tweaking and altering in order to perform well based on prior results.

Dont trust your developers in this respect.. i have yet to meet a developer who puts any thought into SEO whatsoever.