Pre-SEO Analysis – Factors to Consider

Regina Timothy is the founder and editor of TechNews Report, an online media property that covers business and technology news for small and medium enterprises.

The goal of executing a SEO campaign is to position the website to rank well on search queries used by its prospective audience, which will help drive additional qualified traffic through search referrals.

Before starting your SEO Campaign, you should take stock of the existent on-page and off-page SEO activities to help you prepare a strategy for your campaign. This is accomplished through an SEO audit, keyword research, competitive analysis, and strategy implementation that enhance the website’s architecture and content so that it is easily indexed by search engines

Building a great website that no one can find is still a common mistake among today’s marketers. The easiest way to make sure your site appears top on search results is by making sure you host fresh and well-written content relevant to your niche market. After all, it is no secret that content is King. High-quality, search-friendly content allows businesses to populate their sites with keywords and valuable information for visitors (and both are important to search success).

In order to take stock of all your existing SEO assets here are a few things to look at:

• Keyword research-How many people perform a search each month for particular keywords
• Keyword density-Number of keywords present on each web page
• Duplicate content- Presence of duplicate content on your site
• Relevance-How relevant is your content to your target audience?
• Site Hierarchy/Architecture- For multiple directory levels, search engine spiders could have difficulty navigating to the lower reaches of your web site.
• Index Status-Number of WebPages indexed by search engines
• Back links-Incoming links to your website other than your own.
• IP Neighbors: Website IP Neighbors (more on this below)
• Blacklist IP-List of anti-spam databases where the website IP is blacklisted
• Canonicalization-Process of picking up the right URL for the website
• Domain Duplication-Duplicate URLs of the website
• Black Hat- Unethical techniques implemented in the website
• Traffic Estimation-Provides you a rough traffic estimate of the website
• Visitor-behavior-Do visitors spend time reading or do they bounce away quickly?
• Html tags-Do html title tags contain keywords relevant to page topics?
• Meta tags-Do Meta description tags describe what pages are about?
• Speed-Does the site load easily?
• Social sharing-Do many people share your content on social media?
• Social reputation-Do those respected on social networks share your content?

I asked Regina a question regarding IP Neighbors and she responded with the following informative answer:

IP Neighbor

An IP neighborhood of sites is made up of every website that shares an IP. If you have a dedicated server that just hosts your site, there’s not much to worry about, but like most people who have shared hosting, there are some things you need to know.

If some other site is malicious and spamming or distributing viruses, spyware or malware, ISPs or search engines might block the whole IP and your site would be affected. If you find that the other sites on your shared server are spamming or doing other unsavory things, you need to move hosts.

Some tools you can use to check your domain neighbors include: DnsQueries, Domain neighbourhood checker, and IP Neighbors