Search Engine Optimization Analysis and Web Page Optimization

Most articles on SEO tell you the purpose and advantages of having an optimized web page or tell you about how to make you web page SEO friendly. What they fail to tell you is that a lot of analysis needs to go into the actual optimization effort before the actual optimization can begin.
Let us see, one step at a time, how you can get the most out of your optimization efforts, by planning and analysing your needs correctly.
So first off, lets begin with why. Why do you need to analyse and plan your efforts before you actually start optimizing your webpage. Well the efficacy of your optimization efforts depends a lot on several factors. Therefore, before you start with optimizing your webpages, you need to ask yourself :
- Do I have the right keywords?
- Do I understand my competition?
- What makes my competitors, well... my competitors? What do they have that is working for them?
- Is my content relevant? Both in terms of keyword prominence and density
- Whay is my linking strategy
Before you go off rattling away your answers, Wait! (:D). Give it some more thought consider each of these factors in depth.

• The right keyword: It becomes very important to choose the correct keywords or key phrases for your SEO campaign, for it could mean the success or failure of your entire campaign, and it might be a huge wasted effort by the time you realize it's not working for you. Things like business vertical you are in, the region you are based out of, your potential customer base, the monthly search rate of the keywords or key phrases and the existing and potential competitors for the same keywords or key phrases are some of the most important factors in choosing the right word or phrase for your campaign. Having optimal number of words or phrases becomes critical, this helps in two ways one is it allows you to put in a concentrated effort and the other is if one of your keyword or phrase takes a hit at a later stage the other choices will still help you sustain your campaign.
• A Competitor Analysis: 'Know your competitor', jumping straight into a SEO campaign without a proper competitor analysis is the most unwise thing to do. Knowing competitors to the keywords or phrases you have chosen, is a key factor in determining weather you have the budget to pursue your top ranked competitors, weather you have the time and expertise to knock your competitor off the leader board and continue to hold that position against him, so as to make a substantial impact to your business growth. Based on this analysis you could refine your keywords or phrases, the search engine you want to target, weather you have to make it more regional initially and gain a commendable position helping you to further your campaign from there on.
• What do your competitors have that is working for them: 'How did they mange it?', once you have settled on all the above mentioned factors you need to analyze your set of competitors further. You need to determine, to what ever possible extent 'ethically', as to how they managed to reach that position, so that you can take a cue from them and then determine; what are the additional techniques you can employ to edge them out. This makes the SEO campaign so much more effective and concentrated, rather than mindlessly trying to get to the top spot.
• Content relevance in terms of keyword prominence and density: The most common technique people go for when it comes to density of keywords and phrases is deliberately stuff their pages with the keywords and phrases, well let me remind you that search engines 'hate this', and in some extreme cases your page might even get banned for keyword stuffing. However, appropriate percentage of keyword density and matching, streamlined content relevant to the subject is always given more credit by the search engines and will always help you in the long term. Analyze the keywords and content before hand so that it helps you in the long run, see how your competitors have used the keywords and how it fits your bill. Analyze how they have used the keywords and phrases in naming their images, putting up alternate text for images and links. Plan your naming conventions well in advance, before you reach a point of no return.
• Linking Strategy: 'Where and Why': Link building is one of the most prominent aspects of SEO campaign, at the same time creating meaningless links will not help. Analyzing the link building process before hand becomes very critical. Some of the factors that need to be considered before link building are the relevance of the content on the link page and the site page where you intend to put the link up, the page ranking of the site where you are putting up the link, among others. Also keep a close watch on where all your competitors are putting up their respective links and try to top that.

So go on, do the grunt work and get yourself the answers. Once you have them, I can assure you, you are now much closer to your no 1 spot on the search results.
Happy Search Engine Optimizing!

Thanks


Author
Gunjan Mehta