Continued from page 1
13) What are
site’s demographic target markets? (e.g. young urban females, working mothers, single parents etc.)
14) What are 20 search keywords or phrases that I think my/my client’s target markets will use to find site in search engines?
15) Who are my/my client’s major competitors online? What are their URLs? What keywords are they targeting?
16) Who are stake-holders of this site? How will I report to them?
17) Do I have access to site traffic logs or statistics to enable me to track visitor activity during campaign? Specifically, what visitor activity will I be tracking?
18) How do I plan on tracking my or my client’s rankings in search engines?
19) Do I or my client have ability and resources in place to respond to increased traffic/business as a result of campaign?
20) What are my/my client’s expectations for optimization campaign? Are they realistic?
Answers to first 10 questions above will determine how search engine-compatible site currently is and complexity of optimization required. For example, if site pages currently have little text on them, you know you’ll need to integrate more text to make site compatible with search engines and to be able to include your target keywords. If site currently uses frames, you will need to rebuild pages without frames or create special No-Frames tags to make sure site can be indexed, and so on.
This initial analysis will help you to scope time and costs involved in advance. For those of you optimizing client sites, obtaining accurate answers to these questions BEFORE quoting is absolutely crucial. Otherwise you can find yourself in middle of a project that you have severely under-quoted for and that’s very frustrating.
The remainder of questions are to establish in advance who, what, where, when, why and how of optimization campaign. This will help you determine most logical keywords and phrases to target, as well as which search engines and directories to submit site to and which sites to pursue reciprocal links with.
You’re Now Prepared!
So now you are clear about your motivations for optimizing site, you know more about target markets, you know how compatible existing site is with search engines and how much work is involved in search engine optimization process. You’re ready to tackle job!
Copyright © 2004 by Kalena Jordan. All rights reserved under U.S. and international law.
Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia and New Zealand, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running her own SEO business Web Rank, Kalena manages Search Engine College, an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing subjects.
