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.
Michael
Murray is vice president of Fathom SEO, a SEO
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." michael@fathomseo.com
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