Jul
08How to keep track of your SEO changes and research?
Tags : SEO, To Do Posted in: Search Engine Optimisation
I’ve got a mammoth new job ahead of me, something I wasn’t really concerned about, until I read a book on SEO and discovered that my websites were letting me down and not selling my products well enough.
So I’ve got to change my site design, come up with some good keywords which people will use to find my product, while incorporate these keywords into my content / selling strategy. And I’ve got to keep track on my changes, to see how well I’m doing, also so I don’t end up research the same things, over and over.
So what do I do?
I guess I need to keep some sort of document, with the URL of the page I’m working on. Perhaps the old keywords and a summary of keyword density ? Also a list of all the site linking to me or if the list is long a count of the site.
Then under neath that, my new keywords, density and count.
Have I missed anything?
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by JM
I’d be interested in keeping track of the following:
a. URL of the page you are working on.
b. Keywords (not the meta tag the actual words and phrases) for the page.
b. Page Title
c. Description meta tag
d. h1 tag
e. Textual content of the page - p, alt, h2, h3
f. Links to the page - and the link text should match the keywords
g. Where the incoming links are positioned. If they are in the middle of paragraphs on the same topic and the page all the better.
Density isn’t worth worrying about consciously. If you are writing about maths products you are going to mention maths a lot anyway. It might have been an interesting topic in 1996 but spiders are far more clever now.
As scattered through numerous posts in this blog and our emails, here’s the tips for text:
1. Title - include up to 3 keywords separated by - or |.
2. h1 - Try to make it match the first keyword in the title.
3. Only include 1 h1 tag.
4. Make the h1 tag appear near the start of the page.
5. Make sure the first paragraph of text after the h1 contains your keywords.
6. Make sure the description tag includes phrases on the actual content of the page.
7. Use h2 to highlight important sections/ phrases.
8. Use bold b or strong to emphasis important words.
Oh, out of interest I looked at Google Analytics and noticed that yesterday there were 1032 page views on SoftTester and another rise in visitors and traffic via Google, Ask and Aol. Let’s hope it keeps on rising. SoftTester has tens of thousands of pages so I wouldn’t be surprised if it will take many weeks for all the effects of the mods we’ve made in the past 3 weeks or so to take effect.
Yay
had 1,047 impressions on adsense on Monday and a close thing on Tuesday 989. As you say I think your right it will take weeks, in which case if i’m getting 1k now, what will I be getting in a few weeks :-I
You list looks good so far, but I’d like to have a definitive guide. e.g internal links, keyword links. Perhaps we can work on it here and produce a page (not a post) ? We can discuss.
I’m now thinking SEO’ing all my pages, I mean the task itself, its just too big. How much stuff will be useful to record? I was thinking last night I might need a CMS with a record per page, where I keep old revisions of each page as old records.
Then I started thinking is this over the top.
Need something quick and easy, I guess you haven’t got that many pages to worry about, but what do you do?
Thoughts?
Things to add to the definitive guide of current thinking towards Google bot:
Choose obtainable good keywords, if you find good keywords on word tracker, do a search on them and make sure that the top sites aren’t brilliant and that you stand a chance of knocking them off the top placements.
While doing this, if you do find a site which you can compete with, look at their keywords etc.
Remove ALL irrelevant external links.
Get good inbound links, so whats a good inbound link, a site with PR 3 or above?
I was thinking for my shop site that I’d create some demo programs of my cd products and submit pad files. The links I get back might not be that good. Although I suppose this isn’t too bad as long as I get a good volume of links from this approach?
So how to get good quality in bound links? In my book it says look for keyword add url sites on google. Also ask for links.
And use http://www.link.popularity.com to look at what links your competitor has and ask those sites for links.
Make sure you have a search feature on your site.
Shout out what you want in your copy, don’t waffle.
Keyword links.
Make sure you are on all search engines, including DMOZ.
Get rid of revisit-after meta tag.
Useful file names, I guess this means, keywords in there too ?
250 to 300 words content.
Useful downloads PDF’s, DOC’s etc, I guess if I have zips that will be good.
Another point which is says, is to add one or two inbound links each weeks, this could be a big job.
Sitempas
I guess another important point is to decide who your page is aimed at, e.g. UK, men, their approximate age and what they would like to see on a page.
Check for errors and load time
Re-evaluate every 6 months.
So out of that list is there anything else which is important, perhaps we could priorities them, so it give me some things I can do quickly.
Big list!
Start with the basic text on the page in the order of my list in the first comment. Choose keywords first then write the text.
Incoming links are vital. It is also essential to get the link text matching your keywords - hence my comment the other day about Software Archiv on media soft.
So what do I really need to record if any ?
The first comment above lists what you need to record.
Personally, I wouldn’t bother making a record, I’d just make the mods directly to each page. The pages themselves will then be the record.