By Kalena Jordan
One of the most important aspects of a search engine optimization project is also one of the most overlooked – preparation! There are some important steps to take in advance of optimizing your site that will make sure your SEO is successful.
To determine your project requirements, you need to have the following questions answered:
1. What technology was used to build the site? (i.e. Flash, PHP, frames, Cold Fusion, JavaScript, Flat HTML etc)
2. What are the file extensions of the pages? (i.e. .htm, .php, .cfm etc)
3. Does the site contain database driven content? If so, will the URLs contain query strings? e.g. www.site.com/longpagename?source=123444fgge3212, (containing “?” symbols), or does the site use parameter workarounds to remove the query strings? (the latter is more search engine friendly).
4. Are there at least 250 words of text on the home page and other pages to be optimized?
5. How does the navigation work? Does it use text links or graphical links or JavaScript drop-down menus?
6. Approximately how many pages does the site contain? How many of these will be optimized?
7. Does the site have a site map or will it require one? Does the site have an XML sitemap submitted to Google Sitemaps ?
8. What is the current link popularity of the site?
9. What is the approximate Google PageRank of the site? Would it benefit from link building?
10. Do I have the ability to edit the source code directly? Or will I need to hand-over the optimized code to programmers for integration?
11. Do I have permission to alter the visible content of the site?
12. What are the products/services that the site promotes? (e.g. widgets, mobile phones, hire cars etc.)
13. What are the site’s geographical target markets? Are they global? Country specific? State specific? Town specific?
14. What are the site’s demographic target markets? (e.g. young urban females, working mothers, single parents etc.)
15. What are 20 search keywords or phrases that I think my/my client’s target markets will use to find the site in the search engines?
16. Who are my/my client’s major competitors online? What are their URLs? What keywords are they targeting?
17. Who are the stake-holders of this site? How will I report to them?
18. Do I have access to site traffic logs or statistics to enable me to track visitor activity during the campaign? Specifically, what visitor activity will I be tracking?
19. How do I plan on tracking my or my client’s conversion trends and increased rankings in the search engines?
20. What are my/my client’s expectations for the optimization project? Are they realistic?
Answers to the first 10 questions above will determine the complexity of optimization required. For example, if the site pages currently have little text on them, you know you’ll need to integrate more text to make the site compatible with search engines and include adequate target keywords. If the site currently uses frames, you will need to rebuild the pages without frames or create special No-Frames tags to make sure the site can be indexed, and so on.