When you first begin the SEO process, performing a thorough analysis on your site is essential. Not only does this allow you to plan out exactly how much work your site is going to need for search engine optimisation, it allows you to see what your assets are. Without the knowledge of your existing site assets, there’s a great danger of overlooking them.
A smart business always makes full use of its current assets, yet online a lot of businesses seem to mess this up. Either they overvalue their assets, thinking that their fancy Flash-based site should be worth a lot more than it is, or they overlook them, ignoring some truly valuable links and relationships. A proper site analysis will reveal a list of SEO assets and provide some idea of the way forward.
Before you begin your site’s search engine optimisation, you need to know where it currently sits. A professional SEO company can help with this, and you can discuss site analysis with us at SEO Consult Australia. If you want to get an idea of your site’s search engine optimisation needs before approaching a professional, there are several things you need to do.
1. Find out your current relationship with the search engines. This is a simple case of noting your ranking and manually checking where you end up in various searches. If you have no idea of what keywords you currently compete on, it’s a good idea to skip to the second step first.
2. Look for current competitive keywords. Even sites that have never undergone search engine optimization will come up for some keyword searches. Those searches might just be their own brand name, but they can also be for a surprising number of relevant keywords. Analyse your pages for key terms, and see where you sit in the search engine results for each of them.
3. Examine your site’s structure. Structural problems can prevent your pages from getting indexed properly. When a search engine spider wanders over your site, you want it to crawl as many of your pages as possible. Search engine spiders aren’t inclined to crawl too deeply into a site, so you need to make the paths to your main pages as clear as possible. It’s a good idea to draw up a plan of your structure and check for any ’spider traps.’
4. Look at your link profile. Plenty of sites don’t know the value of their existing links. It is vital to your search engine optimization plan that you discover how strong a link profile you currently have, and start planning on how you can build on it.
5. Investigate your competitors. Part of SEO is in finding the right balance of techniques for your industry. If everyone else in your industry has a 1000-page site, it’s harder for your 20-page site to compete. Look at your competitors’ sites, search for their keywords, and investigate their link profile. You may find one or two optimization techniques that you can make use of yourself.
