SOM Report

The most powerful and effective methods of quickly increasing search engine visibility and achieving higher rankings are Website redesign and editorial search engine optimization. Proper site design, page layout, and navigational setup will improve visitor satisfaction and increase revenues. When combined with today’s sophisticated analytics, you will even come to know what sells and what doesn't.

SEO Best Practices Research

• Determine how well search engines find and interpret the website’s content.
• Find out if you’re blocking the search engine spiders.
• Create a competitive website analysis to uncover details of your top ten competitors’ ranking strategies and the actions you can take to offset them and gain an advantage.
• Create a search visibility report that tracks a search-engine “spider’s” perspective of your site to reveal blocks, dead ends, and overall “spider” compatibility.
• Run a search saturation report to see how many page listings you have with the major search engines
• Create a keyword density analysis report that shows which web pages are telling search engines by analyzing keyword frequency.
• Establish a keyword effectiveness indicator that reports the number of web pages competing for selected keywords on Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
• Record current sales volume.
• Create a current server log report to see how many unique visitors your site has.
• Run a keyword ranking report to reveal a website’s top 30 rankings, per
• keyword, across the major search engines.
• Use a link popularity report to identify those who are linking to the website in
• order to calculate how many major search-engine links currently     point to it.
• Optimize all website images using keywords in names, links and other design techniques.
• Write or re-write copy to create “topical community” to make it “search-engine friendly.”
• Develop search-engine-specific, keyword-rich pages.
• Manually submit site information to major search engines. Seed listings with links from already listed pages and sites.
• Prepare the site for submission to top directory listings, including Yahoo and DMOZ.
• Develop customized thematic linking strategies and link-popularity programs.
• Implement an ongoing PR campaign using optimized press releases.
• Produce an ongoing business Blogs and Podcast projects.
• Submit articles and white papers to online sites and eZines.
• Correct all broken links and create a custom "page-not-found" document
• Create a Google site map and optimized site map

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Gerry Grant CEO/Founder Search-Optimization.com, an Orange County Internet Marketing Company, has been actively involved in search engine marketing since 1994. This is a series on search marketing best practices.