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If you?re serious about SEO, you need to know how to analyze
the information you uncover.
A decade ago, businesses were wondering whether they need to be
part of the Internet. By the late 1990s, plenty signed up and
did the basics like placing keywords in the META data.
Unfortunately, that?s all some companies do ? pick out keywords
that may or may not be appropriate and pack them into the META
keyword data set that search engines pretty much ignore.
Proper analysis requires sound thinking and judgment in many
areas. We?ll focus on two major ones ? Top 300 and page caching.
Top 300 What?s the Top 300? It doesn?t sound too valuable unless
your biggest customer of the last 10 years actually traveled
that deep into the depths of search engine information overload.
Actually, any number will do depending on your interest. Start
with your 10 favorite search terms (or carefully targeted search
terms). To track your growth, think big. If you?re ranking No.
292 one week and then a week later, you?re No. 154, you know
you?re on the right track.
Too many SEO managers
make the mistake of tracking the Top 30 results and miss out on
the wonderful fact that they?re already No. 31. Don?t be poorly
informed.
Page Caching Google is the best for this because of how fast it
continues to reindex pages. Create your own Google Cache
Calendar ? a Word or Excel document will do. List your strategic
pages ? say about 10 for starters. Apply the Top 300 rule, check
your rankings and record the cache dates. Over time, those dates
form patterns that can help you determine when Google will
return next ? enabling you to time your next set of SEO updates.
If you?re not in the Top 300, you can still get some perspective
from the page cache analysis if you?re still planning to
optimize a given page. It?s easy to find the page ? if it?s in
Google?s index. Just enter the URL as your search phrase or find
some unique text from the page and search for that string of
words with quotes on each end. Either will result in a top SEO
ranking and you can grab the cache date.
The bottom line is that you need to track you?re progress before
making changes to the strategic SEO pages.
About the author:
Michael Murray is vice president of Fathom SEO, a search engine
optimization firm. He authored the ?U.S. Manufacturers
Resist Natural Search Engine Optimization and Online Sales
Leads? study and a white paper, "Search Engine Marketing: Get in
the Game."
href="mailto:michael@fathomseo.com">michael@fathomseo.com
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