What 5 areas would you......

[2forgiveisdivine]

....first examine if you were asked to perform a SEO to a particular web site and/or 5 areas you think have the greatest influence in SEO??

Any and all answers/feedback are appreciated.

Thanks and God bless.

[Sebastien Billard]

1- Spider blocking content : javascript, Flash, robots.txt...
2- <Titles> elements
3- Text content : quantity, quality of copywriting...
4- Website structure : internal linking scheme, semantic markup...
5- External SEO : quality and quantity of links, anchor used...

[PuneetJvw]

Nice answer Sebastien.

I would check Html code first before all those 5 things.


Regards/Puneet M.

[MattUK]

1. Keyword targeteing
2. Site usablity - links, sitemap, HTML etc
3. On page factors, titles, content, tags
4. Internal link strurcture
5. External links to the site

[2forgiveisdivine]

yo guys, ty for the feedback...and taking the time to state your opinion.....

keep them coming....God bless =)

[jackson992]

I'm actually surprised links isn't the very first thing you guys mentioned. I think that is the most important and following that content. Coding has nothing to do with rankings as stated by Matt on the Google videos.

[2forgiveisdivine]

Originally Posted by jackson992

I'm actually surprised links isn't the very first thing you guys mentioned. I think that is the most important and following that content. Coding has nothing to do with rankings as stated by Matt on the Google videos.

Ive done some serious research the past couple days to catch up on the everchanging world of SEO.....and you are right jackson.... INBOUND LINKS seems to be the one that is consistently mentioned as the most important by all the sources I have read so far.

again, ty for taking the time to read and post

late.

[thegypsy]

Yes..before we do anything we establish a clients current Link Profile.
It's NUMBER ONE. All the SEO in the world won't help a site with a bad Link Profile...

So good call IMHO

Next?

See what Keyword research has been done and look at competitiveness of the terms

Find and empirical data on hand to see past performance.

SEF URLS.. yes? Or no?

Page Titles and internal linking structure

Site Map?



How’s that for a different flavor on the post…? Thought it might give a new direction of 2…. And NO the code won’t help you. Leave it.

[lemmybrown]

Originally Posted by jackson992

I'm actually surprised links isn't the very first thing you guys mentioned. I think that is the most important and following that content. Coding has nothing to do with rankings as stated by Matt on the Google videos.

Is it not true that if the textual content of a page appears last in the source code after billions of nested tables, the spiders may give up reading the page before they get to the content?

[Sebastien Billard]

Links loose a lot of value if your content is not spiderable. And good content is more efficient at generating quality links. This is why I mentionned links after content optimization

[jackson992]

Originally Posted by lemmybrown

Is it not true that if the textual content of a page appears last in the source code after billions of nested tables, the spiders may give up reading the page before they get to the content?

Not true at all

I'd agree with Sebastien that spiderability/ crawlability of a site is one of the most critical aspects (afterall, it is not the home page alone that one is trying to optimize).
* Make a site user friendly (from a navigation perspective) & spiderable (search engine friendly), so that a robot get through to all the pages
* Write good, relevant content for each page
* Write proper title tags defining what the page is about
* Build in-bound links
* Keep the website fresh with reasonably regular updates

[halcyon999]

Hi -

Personally, I'd start with what I see as the basics -

1 - I'd check for spam/blackhat stuff - obvious things like keyword stuffing, hidden text/redirects/cloaking. All the nasties you hear of, anything negative which may harm ranking.
2 - Then I'd make sure the content was right. Ensuring it was good for the visitor, readable, engaging and informative. Even basics like spelling and grammar would be worth checking in my (humble!) opinion.
3 - Tags - I know some people say they're useless for SE's - but at least for the user they may be useful and still get used for the description lines in a lot of SE's. So I'd check Title, Keywords, Description to make sure they were all concise, on-topic and not over bloated.
4 - Links - then I'd start looking at links - a) your internal link structure/anchor text etc, and b) how to garner them from other websites.
5 - Other promotion/marketing - such as articles, press releases, offline stuff maybe. Depends on the site, but there's a whole raft of stuff to consider to get the word out about the site you're working for.

HTH,
Darren

[MattUK]

Originally Posted by jackson992

I'm actually surprised links isn't the very first thing you guys mentioned. I think that is the most important and following that content. Coding has nothing to do with rankings as stated by Matt on the Google videos.

Agree that links are the most important factor when hitting the more competitive keyphrases, though when examining a site they aren't the first thing I look at. On page factors are more easily fixed and can bring more instant results. External linking id something I look at over a longer timeframe, it isn't something that can be fixed in a day, week or even a month.

[thegypsy]

Originally Posted by MattUK

Agree that links are the most important factor when hitting the more competitive keyphrases, though when examining a site they aren't the first thing I look at. On page factors are more easily fixed and can bring more instant results. External linking id something I look at over a longer timeframe, it isn't something that can be fixed in a day, week or even a month.

Sure, but if it's a nasty Link Profile, all of the On-page work in the world won't save the site...?

[MattUK]

True, but as I said, a nasty link profile can take months to sort out. The list isn't in order of influence, but in the order that I look at them in. I'm not saying don't look at the links, but there are other things I'd do first.

[Chris Boggs]

Related threads: Top 5 SEO Money Investments and the great thread started by Todd What Top 5 Skills Would You Study to Become a Better SEO?

[Webmaster T]

I always start with a client interview to understand the goals and business, however, I believe the thread assumes this has already been done. If it is a running site. In that case:
1. How does the site currently convert the goal
2. Review Competitor sites and keyword research to identify the content weaknesses of the industry/ sector ie: where's the linkbait opportunity!
3. Document structure/usabilty/CTA review
4. Optimization of infrastructure/link architecture
5. Look for the hidden spam from past campaigns (don't rely on clients they lie and forget about the past indigressions!)

Notice I could care less about IBL's because that looks after itself if the strategy above is implemented correctly! I only care about what I have complete control over to improve the usability, navigation and on page/infrastructure optimization. The rest comes with good content and conventional ie: always been a part of SEO not site promotion.

In the good old days SEO's knew linking was a special area of site promotion requiring more then the ability to send a useless reciprocal link request, so... give people a reason to come to the site and the links follow naturally with little work!

[SEMBasics]

This is NOT my top five, just some other factors that I think should be considered:

1) Timeline and budget
2) Existing resources including staff, business parnterships, etc.
3) Potential resources


Timeline and budget
A timeline and budget are rather important - there are numerous costs that can be associated with SEO such as directory submissions, press releases, hiring people to write content, programming costs not to mention hiring SEO firms or professionals. Before embarking on such a campaign, it is important to work out a timeline and budget for these costs so that one can best allocate their resources for the set period of time as well as evaluate the financial benefit of the search campaign.

Existing resources/Potential resources
It is always best to play to a persons/companies strenghts, and this is no different with SEO. Before devising a SEO strategy it is worthwhile evaluating the existing and potential strenghts that a company has. Perhaps they have some great business partnerships which can be exploited to help bring in either quality traffic, quality links or both. Maybe they have some unique talent on their staff which can be used to the same purpose. If a company has a lot of quality programmers at their disposal then it may be worthwhile to develop some free software tools which they can place on their site and/or distribute for links. If they have quality writers they may want to have them write articles, press releases, or content for the site.

[g1smd]

Check the non-www to www redirects are correct using WebBug or similar.
Check on-page HTML code at the W3C HTML validator.
Check site spideribility using Xenu LinkSleuth etc.
Check for duplicate content issues using site:domain.com searches.
Review the content and incoming linking.

Fix all problems found.