Running Baseline Assessments for SEO

Posted: March 3, 2009 by Jacob Stoops Comments
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Running Baseline Assessments for SEO
Explanations of why establishing baselines is critical to measure SEO success.

Running baseline assessments are tremendously important to the start of any SEO campaign. These baseline metrics give you a starting point from which to measure your SEO success or failure.

To put it another way, lets imagine that you went on a diet but forgot to weigh yourself at the beginning. You hit the gym for a week straight and eat salads for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

The end of the week comes, you step on the scale, and it says you weight 163lbs. You have no way of knowing whether this is a success or failure? Is it good news or bad news? Well, you’ll never know how much you gained or lost because you didn’t start with a baseline.

Running Baseline Assessments for SEO

Okay, I’m Convinced!

Now that you know how important it is to run baseline reports for SEO, you’re probably asking “What am I supposed to measure?” Glad you asked. I will be providing advanced tips to teach you how to determine your SEO baseline.

Here is a short-list of the things we will be measuring:

1.) Rank
This will be a measure of where (or if) your website is ranked in such places as Google, Yahoo & MSN for your chosen keywords and their many variations.

2.) Indexed Pages
This will show you how many of your site’s pages have been scanned & indexed by the search engines.

3.) Inbound Links
This will be a measure of how many websites are currently linking to your site.

4.) Overall Site Optimization
We will take a look at your site’s current optimization and try to identify how we will work with it, as well as potential strenghths & weaknesses.

5.) Initial Site Traffic
We will need to take a look at your site’s initial traffic numbers, so we can see if we can make it grow in the time to come.

Stay tuned for my next article, which will assist you in a best practices of rank checking.

Photo Credit: shotbart on Flickr

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Article Written By Jacob Stoops

I black out when I talk SEO (kind of like: “Old School” Frank-the-Tank’s debate vs. James Carville). Also, I’m a designer who never likes my own designs.

Posts to Date: 81 amazing posts!

 
  • You're absolutely right, internal link navigation is super important for SEO. I will take a look at that in the Overal Site Optimization section...
  • We should also measure our internal links.
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