SEO Measurement and Game Plan

Test the following:

1. the title tag

2. the headline (H1) tag

3. the placement of the body copy in the HTML

4. the words in the body copy

5. your keyword prominence

6. the keyword density

7. your anchor text or internal links to that page

8. your anchor text or inbound links to that page from sites that you have influence over

9. the URL structure, including occurrences of keywords in the URL, number of directories om the URL and complexity of the URL (i.e., number of parameters in the query string)

Then measure the following:

1. traffic to the page being tested

2. traffic to the site overall

3. backlinks to the page being tested (according to the three major engines)

4. spider accessed to that page

5. search terms driving traffic per page

6. rankings across the three engines

7. number and percentage of pages yielding search traffic

8. unique pages being spidered

9. pages indexed

10. ratio of pages spidered to pages indexed

11. ratio of brand to nonbrand search terms

12. conversion rate

13. searchers delivered per search term

Ignore or Avoid

The PageRank score reported by Google’s Toolbar Server. These are months out of sync with PageRanks used by their ranking algorithm. Also, be wary of testing right before, during or right after the holiday season if your business is seasonal. It’s hard to tease out from the results what impact was due to seasonality and what was due to test.

Stephan Spencer is president and founder of Netconcepts, a Web design and consulting firm specializing in search engine, optimal Web sites and applications. Reach him at sspencer@netconcepts.com.