The previous post, Search Engine Optimization: An Introduction, offered a quick overview of what SEO is all about and why we would want to go about doing it.
The different phases of a recommended SEO Strategy are Analysis of the environment and technology, Implementation and Maintenance.
In this post we will take a look at the Analysis phase.
The Analysis phase includes Keyword Research, Page and Site Analysis, Ranking Analysis and Link Analysis.
Keyword Research is the core of the Analysis phase. A good amount of brainstorming and research should be done during this stage. During the keyword identification stage, those words need to be identified that will allow your site to be ranked highly in the search engines. These should be the words that the organization feels are going to be what users are most likely to search for when the intent is to find information that is available on the website. This stage essentially should result in a list of keywords (combination of 1, 2 and 3 words) that would establish relevance of the site to the intent of the search.This is one of the main elements that gives the page strength and makes it “friendly” to the search engine spiders. Who should ideally be doing this? The people in the organization who are responsible for marketing. This is not a call that the IT department can make. What the keywords are should be decided mainly by the marketing folks. Where on the page and site these words need to be placed is what the programmers or IT department will decide.
An analysis of target terms involves analysing the content of any given page and extracting those terms that appear to be targeted at search engines. Using a tool like Target Terms will give you valuable insight about what words the search engines may find relevant on your webpage. This will allow you to decide if your site has the right mix of words that you have thought to be relevant to the content of your site. This will allow you to decide on the changes that need to be made of the keywords that are contained in your site. That is why it is important to identify the most prominently employed words and phrases on the site.
Another type of analysis involving keywords is the Keyword Difficulty analysis. This helps you determine if the words that you have narrowed down on and feel should be the words most relevant to the content on your site can be easily ranked highly in the search engines. This is essentially an analysis of the competitive landscape of a particular keyword, providing a percentage score and a detailed analysis of the top ranking sites at Google and Yahoo.
After carrying out a detailed analysis on the keywords, the next thing to do is to carry out a Page and Site analysis to determine how accessible is the site and the various pages to the major search engines.
The Crawl Test will help determine the accessibility of the site to search engines and provide an overview of the site’s search friendliness. It gives you an idea of the extent of indexing in the major search engines and will give you a detailed report on on http status code, primary keywords on the page, meta description, and the number of internal links on each page.
The Page Strength tool can be used to measure the number of sites/pages that link to your site. It will measure the number of times your brand is mentioned on the web. Using this tool you can run a competitive analysis to see which other sites in your field are doing well. It will allow you to monitor your progress over time.
A Competitive Analysis will give you an idea how the competitive sites are ranking for the same keywords that you have arrived at.
A Link Analysis helps in the identification of how many unique domains are linking to a page, subdomain, or to your entire website. This will allow you to analyze competitors to see what they are doing successfully. It will help you in the identifying the most important links pointing to a page as well as the anchor text used most frequently by those links
A Ranking Analysis will help you determine how your site ranks across various search engines. A tool like Tracking Rank can be used in the retrieval of search engine rankings for pages and keywords, tracking rankings in Google, Yahoo!, MSN/Bing over time and validating progress toward SEO goals.
In the next post we will take a look at the Technology considerations that affect the SEO process.
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