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04.09.10 Do Your Research Before Optimizing Your Site  By Jacob StoopsAttempting to implement SEO on your website can be a fairly murky process for many webmasters. An even murkier question, "Where do you start?" If you've never implemented SEO on your website before, it can be a little overwhelming, and there is much you need to do. Worse yet, what if you start off doing to wrong things-like implementing your optimization before you do research, only to find out six months down the road that your keyword targeting isn't working). We don't want that to happen, so I've developed an 8-step guide to help guide you as you work through your SEO campaign. This guide will ensure that you cover your bases in an appropriate (and more importantly, organized) order. Below are the chapter headings, so feel free to jump around: • Step #1: Begin Gathering Benchmarking Data • Step #2: Identify & Overcome Crawlability Issues • Step #3: Research • Step #4: Keyword Benchmarking • Step #5: On-Site SEO • Step #6: New Content Identification & Targeting • Step #7: Off-Site SEO • Step #8: Review, Report, Tweak, Repeat Step #1: Begin Gathering Benchmarking Data. This should be the first step with every SEO campaign. If you think about it, how will you ever know if your SEO is working if you don't measure some statistics at the beginning of the process? If you don't measure key things up front, it's sort of like flying blind. Some of the things you should measure up front: • Traffic Metrics - Website traffic is usually how most people measure the success of an SEO campaign. While it is very important, there are individual statistics within your analytics platform that are just as important. See my article, Total Visits Aren't the Only SEO Traffic Measure That Matters. • Inbound Links - You'll need to measure the total quantity and quality of inbound links pointing to your website. Search engines view inbound links as a "vote" for your website, which they partially use to determine a website's relative authority. Open Site Explorer is a great tool from SEOMoz that measure inbound links quality and quantity. • Google PageRank (PR) - Google's method of calculating a web page's relevance and importance through the quality of sites linking to it, and a variety of other factors. The precise details of the algorithm are kept secret and Google continues to "enhance" its performance. The score is measured on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 being the highest. • MozRank - refers to both SEOmoz's general, logarithmically scaled 10-point measure of global link authority or popularity as well as an algorithm for computing that measure. It is very similar to Google PageRank, and is a very good measure of a website's authority and trust. You can track your MozRank by downloading at installing SEOMoz's SEO Toolbar for Firefox. Continue reading this article. About the Author: Jacob Stoops is the Director of SEO at People To My Site, a Columbus-based Search Engine Marketing firm. He has been actively involved in Search Engine Optimization since 2006, starting off as a lowly web designer before transforming into an SEO maven, blogger, and social media enthusiast. He has worked with hundreds of large, medium, and small businesses to effectively generated higher volumes of traffic and better rankings, while remaining on the cutting edge in the implementation of SEO best practices. He runs an SEO tips/portfolio website, Agent SEO |
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