Top SEO Factors to Review for 2012
The start of a new year is an opportune time to assess your goals and objectives at a certain point in time. You have the benefit of comparing your current benchmarks with that of the previous year’s results hence you may have a better guide on how to move forward for the coming year onwards.
This does not only apply to your personal life however but also to your life’s other pursuits, such as with SEO if you happen to be seriously into it.
This is as good a time as any other to get a year-on-year comparison of your various SEO benchmarks and look at the bigger picture in trying to evaluate how you would want to move forward instead of relying on snapshot figures coupled with time pressure that only leads you to take a myopic view in evaluating your progress and results.
Now is the time to really sit down and take a thorough evaluation of the things which you need to look into and improve as far as SEO for your site is concerned for this year onwards.
- Review your key performance indicators and site mission
This is the time to take a look back at the mission of your site when you initially ventured out to start the enterprise and the key performance indicators which you agreed to adopt in order to assess your progress vis-à-vis the overall mission objectives that you set. Are you still on track? In case you have veered away, what kind of adjustments do you need to do on this regard?
- Review your annotations and timelines pertaining to Google Analytics
Hopefully, you have been keeping tabs of the various initiatives and changes that you have implemented for SEO along with their implementation dates, otherwise you may be forced to browse through hours upon hours of emails and other odd notes.
- Evaluate top keywords
Go to Google Webmaster Tools and take a look at the most frequently used keywords of your site including their variations. This will enable you to assess whether you’re still sending the right signals to Google as far as your targeted keywords are concerned, and for you to make some timely adjustments as necessary.
- Review your on-site internal linking
Still using Google Webmaster Tools, try to find out the most frequently linked pages that you have on your site. Make sure that the pages that you marked as the most important ones for your site are still the ones that are being prioritized because you might be surprised to know that sometimes other pages or content have already overtaken these key items or content that you would rather highlight.
These are just some of the things that you can review for your site for this new year. While they do not actually guarantee instant and immediate results in terms of your SEO goals, but you’ll be surprised to know about your progress or how far you have gone away from your original intent for the site just by taking a one-time more macroscopic assessment of these factors.
George Peterson currently works for one of the leading search marketing agencies in Denmark – Outrider. He currently works as a SEO (interesting to know is that the Danish term is søgemaskineoptimering) manager.
