Every once in a while, it makes sense to take a step back from your SEO efforts and take a look at your SEO strategy from a bird’s eye view. It’s so easy to get lost in the day to day minutia of running your company, building links, fulfilling customer orders, writing emails, creating blog posts and so on that we don’t actually step back and look at whether or not our strategy is optimal.
Taking a step by to review your SEO strategy only takes an hour or two. Yet this hour or two could easily save you over a dozen hours of work and help you take your rankings to the next level.
Here are seven tips on exactly what you should review and pay attention to.
1 . Your Site Goals and Key Metrics
What are your goals for the website in general? Before addressing SEO specifically, take a step back and look at your overall goals.
Are you trying to build a website that generates enough passive income for you to live off of? Or are you trying to build a site geared to sell for $100 million in five years? The strategy you choose for each of these would be drastically different.
Based on your goals what are your key metrics? Are you on target to hitting those metrics? Are your goals still the same now as they were when you first started your business?
Begin your review from this long term view, then move on to the SEO specifics.
2 .Anchor Text Density
Anchor text density is often a balancing act between having enough density that Google knows what your page is about, without so much density that Google thinks you’re link spamming.
Whenever you get a link, you should try and have the exact link anchor text only about 10% to 20% of the time. You should have a variation of the keyword, a LSI keyword or a longtail version of the keyword another 20% to 30% of the time. The rest of the time, the anchor text should have nothing to do with your keyword.
For example, you might have anchor texts like “click here” or “to learn more” or “check out David’s website at.” Why? Because that’s how natural organic links are built. If you have 100% of your links made up of targeted anchor texts, Google will get suspicious.
3 . Review Your Internal Linking Strategy
How your internal links are currently setup? Is the system out of date? Now might be the time for an update.
For example, let’s say you you’ve been meaning to implement a “related post” function in your site. You’ve been putting it off, because the process is largely manual. You have to go through each post on your site and identify articles that should be linked to.
Yet, if you’ve been meaning to do it for months, chances are you won’t get it done if you don’t just do it.
If your internal linking strategy isn’t strong yet, look at ways to increase the flow of link juice between your pages.
4 .What Keywords Are Sending You Traffic?
Take a look at your traffic logs and see what kinds of keywords are actually sending you traffic. This will tell you a few things.
First, it’ll tell you what Google thinks your website is about. If you think your site is about rabbits but Google keeps sending you traffic about bunnies, you know that Google thinks bunnies are more relevant to your site than rabbits.
Second, it gives you potential new terms to target. For example, you might want to create some exclusive content around bunnies if you’re getting a lot of hits on those terms.
5 . How Are You Doing for Your Target Keywords?
Apart from keywords that you’re ranking for accidentally, how are you doing for keywords that you’re trying to rank for deliberately?
Have you been moving up or down in rankings? Are you on the front page? Do you need to put more effort into ranking for those keywords, or should you switch your focus to a different and easier to rank for keyword?
Evaluate your progress on your target keywords. Figure out whether or not those should still be your target keywords.
6 .Record All Changes, Track Results
Any time you make a fundamental change to the way your site operates, make a note of it. Any time you change your internal linking structure or implement a new linking strategy, make a note of it. Any time you change a title tag, make a note of it.
Then measure your traffic and your rankings. Did your changes work? Did they make things worse? Or did your rankings skyrocket?
Keep meticulous notes of your SEO efforts to make sure you get the most out of what’s working and stop doing what’s not working.
7 .Check your W3C & Schema
If you haven’t checked your WC3 validation recently, check it now. It only takes a few minutes but can give you an easy small boost in the search engines.
Likewise, if you haven’t implemented Schema tags yet, do so now. That’ll tell Google that you’re serious about staying on the cutting edge of technology. Google gives boosts to “brand pages” and implementing Schema will help increase your relevance and authority.
This is a guest post by Mohammed Zeeshan Fatmi, from
Directory Maximizer, a company specializing in link building through manual Directory Submissions.
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