Monday, November 16, 2009

SEO Evaluation

Where I have made the majority of my money and one of the most important aspects of internet marketing is SEO. A SEO evaluation is when you go over your website and look intensively at your competition and keywords. This post is aimed at what you should be looking at for a basic evaluation. Usually when I do one for a client it usually takes me 12-24 hours of work before I am finished with the results analyzed. The evaluation I am going to go over with you should only take 6 hours or so since you will not be going into the same depth as when I work on my clients website. I will probably be going into more depth at a later time so be sure to become a reader and keep coming back. If you have read through this blog you will notice that I cover all aspects of web marketing from topics such as web 2.0 to building links and of course SEO (my favorite aspect of web marketing).

The most crucial part of a SEO evaluation is an overall understanding of keywords and how they apply to your web presence. First you need to decide which keywords you will be working with both on site and off site. I have found having around 10 keywords is a good rounded number and allows you plenty of leeway when marketing. You do not want to few since it will look to Google as if you are building links rather than having them come natural. You also will not want to many since you won't really get anywhere so between 5-15 should be your range. Once you have decided which keywords you want to attempt to reach the top of Google for the next step is make sure your site is SEO'd for those words.

After you have the list of keywords you want to reach the top for run them through Google adwords checker at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal to make sure that the keywords have enough traffic. The number it shows is a monthly average rather than the exact amount of searches. I have found around 50,000 searches monthly to be very profitable though the competition goes up with the amount of numbers. When you have ran your keyword selection through this tool and feel you have enough keywords and the search volume is appropriate pick your most searched word and place it in your URL (uniform resource locator) as well as in a h1 tag at the top of your site. It is also helpful to place it a couple times throughout your site being sure that you do not go over board. You should also put the rest of your keywords/keyterms at least once throughout your home page.

Next you will want to check to see your competition. Personally I stick with Google since they handle 60% or so of the worlds search volume. Search Google for each term and look at the top ten search results since you will want to be in the top ten for all of your keyterms and if you work hard enough this is a very realistic goal. You should not have a list of 100 sites that you will be looking at. This is the most time consuming process of the evaluation. First run every site through Yahoo's site explorer to see how many backlinks each of these have. Now thinking about it you will only need to run a couple for each term through to get a rough estimate of how many backlinks you will need (the more the better estimate).

Something that is interesting is the regular search on Google does not show exactly who is placing the keyterms in their anchor when building links. To see who is the top link builders for a certain term you will need to do a more specific Google search. For example if you look at my site How To Make Money Online you will notice that for the search on google make money free it is in the second place, but if you look at who is building links for make money free by doing the inanchor search I am number one. To do this search go to Google and type inanchor:"make money free" and this search will show me who has the most/best backlinks for this certain keyterm. I am number 1 for this search and have been so for quite some time though I am number 2 for a search of make money free. Anyway this shows that building links is the best way to reach the top for a keyword or term.

Well this is at least a start for you. Now if you are not sure where to build links the way I have reached the top of Google for hundreds of keywords is using this system at Free Backlinks. This will give you a base to start your backlink campaign. Also if you have any questions about what I have covered or comments please leave a comment.

3 comments:

  1. seo is the wonderful to index your website on top of the search engine and to get back links and for link building as well.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Optimizing your site for search engine is an important factor in increasing its ranking and popularity...you don't have to worry if you have limited skills in doing SEO..there are now a lot of companies that offer SEO services..however, when choosing the SEO company to work with, always make sure that they are doing legitimate methods to avoid getting your site penalized.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I also check our my competitors on Google because I know that most business owners are optimizing their sites mainly for Google...not only Google have a lot of features that can be used in building links..like for example their Google Local Search..I use this method in finding out who are my main competition and where they get their backlinks..once I found out the sites where they are linked to, I follow them and submit my site there, as well.

    ReplyDelete