SEO Benchmarking Ideas
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Iâve been spending quite a bit more time recently working with some of our âclassicâ optimized pages. Essentially, Iâve been analyzing what weâve done in the past, trying to evaluate whatâs worked and what hasnât.
There are a few key measures that I analyze when benchmarking a site:
1. Keyword ranking reports are my first stop. Analyzing how a site is doing over a period of time can help me to figure out where improvement may be necessary in our SEO campaign.
2. The page should validate. There are always exceptions to this measure, but many times a client may adjust their site inadvertently hampering the site’s validity.
3. Any new site-wide changes need to be analyzed. If a client changes their CSS, how does the page look, feel, etc. It’s always easy for an SEO to leave this measure out, though it’s a very important measure.
As Iâve been looking back on these sites, Iâve kept a running log of any change that I make to the page (e.g. changing a meta-tag, adjusting copy, etc.) A month later, I will look back to see what kind of results my SEO work did. This is a very simple technique to see where progress has been made in an SEO campaign, as well as where more improvement may be necessary.
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Tags: CSS, Search & Marketing, SEO
Posted in Search & Marketing
“The page should validate. There are always exceptions to this measure, but many times a client may adjust their site inadvertently hampering the site’s validity. ”
Is there any evidence to support this - Aaron Wall et al have stated this would be a slipper slope for SE to go down. If it validates it generally means cleaner code - making the site easier to digest. However actually passing the validation test is another matter.
April 17th, 2008 at 4:20 amI think we can agree that there are things that can be done with code that can completely inhibit a search engine’s ability to spider the site. Such things such as not closing the tag or not starting a can be forgiving in a browser but confuse the engines. So yes, someone can go in and screw up the code to the site and mess things up in terms of search engine spidering. Having invalid code won’t necessarily break a site, but we do know that valid code will prevent those kinds of problems.
April 17th, 2008 at 5:03 am