There’s a certain website-whispering aspect to a good SEO professional. You know, the kind of quality that allows them to judge a website just by looking at it, and get it to perform at its best with just a few simple commands. This kind of quality is mysterious, and even other SEO experts might have trouble seeing how they do it. Certainly, the average business owner is at a loss to understand how optimisation professionals can judge websites with the meagre information they have.
Being able to tell a good website from a bad one is an important thing when it comes to SEO. When you’re looking for potential inbound links, or for link partners, you need to know whether their reputation is going to help yours. When you’re looking at competitors, it’s important to know just where they’re coming from.
Gauging a website’s success is no easy thing. It’s not too hard to access information on a site’s PageRank, or any of the other ranking systems out there. You can ferret around and find out their domain age, and even discover their backlinks. All of these are important factors, but they still don’t tell you how they’re doing from an internet user point of view.
Take rankings, for example. Any website owner knows that just because their site has a good PageRank today, it doesn’t mean it’s going to have that rank tomorrow. It also doesn’t mean that they’re making a huge profit from the site, because traffic rates don’t reflect directly on a site’s ranking. In fact, all that a good PageRank tells anyone is that the site meets some of Google’s expectations.
Some of the information you can access through Google can actually be misleading. Inbound links are a good example of this. Experts in the search engine optimisation community often get annoyed at Google’s backlink listings because the company often hides hundreds of links at a time. Google is notoriously cagey about revealing its hand when it comes to site assessment, and usually only a fraction of the actual links indexed are revealed.
Talking to your search engine optimization company can be the easiest way to find out which sites are really worth chasing and linking to. You can discuss this with us at SEO Consult Australia. Other ways you can discover what’s really happening with a site come down to old-fashioned internet detective work.
The first thing you should do when checking out another site is Google it. This simple step is an effective one because no matter how hard Google tries to hide its way of thinking, the evidence is there any time someone does a search. Two searches will give you the basic information you need to know: a search on the site name and the site domain. One will show how successful their on-page SEO is, and the other will reveal their inbound links. There are more in-depth methods to uncovering the true nature of a potential link partner, but this is a good beginning.
