Analytics Prior to Initiating a Search Engine Optimization (seo) Campaign

The following are the four major areas on which every webmaster should work prior to optimizing a website on search engines.

1. Website design, structure and obstacles: For a website to perform better on search engine, it needs a good navigable structure with proper organization of web pages. Also it is very important to find out on-page features that usually prevent a website from ranking higher on search engines. The on-page factors (some of which include titles and meta tags, alt tags, web page content, keyword density, HTML errors, sitemap check, excessive flash, dynamic URLs, redirects Robots.txt, custom 404, use of frames ) must be proper and placed correctly to make a website search engine friendly.

2. Inbound Links: Know how many links are pointing to your site and their nature. Note down the Google page rank of all the pages of the website and also the Alexa rank of the site at the time of beginning search engine optimization (SEO) campaigning as these can be used further to compare the progress rates of the website. Also know about the link text used and the number of linkers. Always remember that a site would be rated higher if it has a good number of back links pointing from top-rated and popular websites. Search engines considered quality to be more important than the quantity. Hence linking pointing from underrated website would add much less to improving the rank of a website. So, when analyzing the inbound links focus more on the type and quality of the links pointing to the site.

3. Competitor Analysis: Identify your top competitors in your business segment. Analyze at least top five competitors and know why and how they are rated top. You can create a benchmark for you search engine optimization (SEO) campaigning by analyzing your top competitors. Know their strong and weak areas, identify your strengths and weakness and plan accordingly to combat them on the web space. Also give a keen observation on their website age, inbound links, Alexa rank, Google page rank, SEO score, number of visitors per day and keyword positioning on Google.

4. Keyword Research: Research and identify which words are used by your competitors in effectively drawing visitors to their sites. Find out the search volume of such keywords/phrases and know which keywords/phrases would best describe your site and easy to optimize. Don’t just focus on one-word search terms, this may narrow down your efforts; concentrate more on stemmed keywords and long-term keywords. Stemmed keywords/phrases and long tail keywords/phrase have comparatively less volume and hence easy to optimize. Secondly being more specific to the business, such keywords/phrases help in driving more quality traffic to your site. This means that even though the site gets limited number of traffic, the probability of converting them into potential customers will be high.