New Site Planning discussion

I have plans to release a new site soon, and I think after a few years of learning, I'm going about this right from the get-go from the beginning. I figured I'd talk a little bit about my plans, and ask the community here for some feedback regarding those plans and maybe get a few suggestions for moving forward.

First - an overview.

This site will be a parenting site, especially focusing on Moms who are somewhere between trying to get pregnant and having children up through kindergarten. A relatively wide range, but it really is based on an existing core community. The site will offer a few things - a message board, articles on parenting related subjects, a directory of sites of interest to our visitors, and an on-the-web section laying out cool products, news, and parenting hotspots on the web.

Revenue initially will be nothing, with adsense/ypn to follow probably within a quarter of release, but even then my plan is to keep the ads in effective areas with effective positioning and not on every page. No products planned currently, but I do plan to build simple and free utilities as ideas arise - things like health risk calculators and such.

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What I'm doing right:

I think the thing I'm doing most right from the get go is that I have an existing community of visitors who are already aware of the site and who have helped to put it together. It's around 30 or so people who are all regular forum posters already, who are active in online parenting communities, and who are genuinely nice people. I don't expect them all to leave their existing message boards, but I think they'll come around enough that I will have an active forum from the beginning.

I also have a core of articles that will tie me over for at least the first few months of the sites existence with regularly updated content.

On the web site side of the street, I know at this point how to do a few things right finally - good inbound link structure,
decent but not overdone on page SEO, lite page design (so it will render quickly on dialup), templating system for easier site management, sitemaps.

On the promotion front, I'm not going to be paying for any inbound links. I'm not going to join any link networks, or really hit any grey areas. My plan is to do some good old fashioned organic link building and PR. I'm budgeting for weekly press releases at the low end of the PRWeb spectrum, plus a highly placed release once every 6 weeks for six months. The subject primarily will be site announcements and progress info (revenue increase announcements, visitor increase announcements), but occasionally thrown in some informative messages and announcing of new features when they are released. Part of our site managment tasks will be organic link building where we will use a strategy of give-more-than-we-receive to obtain strong topic based inbound links. (i.e. site review + directory link + advertising for sites we really want links from) and we will also use a fair amount of scrutiny. Of course, obtaining directory links and posting in related forums will be a daily task as well. I also have a monthly task of submitting articles to article submission sites, but I'm not sure whether to choose a set of 10 or so sites or instead use an article submission service. No adwords or overture ads planned for now, but I plan on resarching it a little more because spending a hundred bucks a month at a minimum bid level might provide a decent ROI.

I plan on using carp rss and another gecko-tribe product (can't remember the name off the top of my head) to pull google news and yahoo news as sort of a wire service for myself and my wife to use as inspiration for articles. As well, we'll use copernic agent and summarizer to help us out.

The subject matter is something both my wife and I are interested in, and it's something my wife already looks at online daily. Theming the site around a specific set of keywords has proven to be difficult because of the wide range of subjects we'll be touching on. That makes Search Engine marketing difficult, and really obtaining any high traffic SERPs unlikely. Rather than that, I've decided that I'm going to try to get some specific article pages ranked for low competition terms by using good internal link structure and by focusing those articles with inbound link text in press releases. Then I'll try my hardest to convert those 4-20 daily visitors into registered users and community contributors. The strategy is to turn the site into a brand that is well known and well thought of by the community at large because it's simply a great place to go for information and community interaction.

This is really the part of the strategy that causes me the most consternation. I have the elements that make everything work - decent SEO friendly design, community interaction, a decent supply of subject matter, a subject I'm interested in and motivated to keep up on, at least a semblance of a promotion strategy, but no real search engine strategy other than to develop inbound links in general. It will take quite a while to get to even 2,000 visitors daily with no decent rankings. My real hope
is that the quality of my inbound links will help the internal pages rank well - and that the community will build itself by word of mouth. The flip side is that I see this as a very realistic strategy. If the focus is on content and community rather than search engine rankings, visitors are more likely to keep coming back and the site will be easier to promote because it will be a good one. Because the content is good, I'll naturally get strong internal links to some internal pages - which I think is the way the folks at the search engines want things to work ideally. If the search engines don't like us, then hopefully people will filter through from those places that do link to us - be they blogs or news sites or whatever. I just think that generic terms like "Parenting" or "Moms" - are just so widely used that even if nobody is focusing on them, it will take a lot of work to rank well with and even if I could get great rankings for those terms, am I really grabbing my target market? The target market really is people searching for tips on things like "how to deal with a diaper rash", "games you can play with your infant", or "preparing a toddler for a sibling". The subject matter is so broad that keyword theming is really impossible - and alternativley coming up with a site just focusing on diaper rash issues is never going to inspire much of a community. Still, every site you develop has to have a trade off somewhere and I suppose this is mine.

My wife will play the content manager/community overseer role whereas I'm going to play more of an administrative/technical role. We'll share the responsibility of site promotion.

"If you build it, they will come" - but will they come in large numbers or small numbers...?

Is it worth the effort? Good idea? Good plan so far? Or is it really that important to think in terms of keywords?