I’ve been spending quite a bit more time recently working with some of our “classic” optimized pages. Essentially, I’ve been analyzing what we’ve done in the past, trying to evaluate what’s worked and what hasn’t.
There are a few key measures that I analyze when benchmarking a site:
1. Keyword ranking reports are my first stop. Analyzing how a site is doing over a period of time can help me to figure out where improvement may be necessary in our SEO campaign.
2. The page should validate. There are always exceptions to this measure, but many times a client may adjust their site inadvertently hampering the site’s validity.
3. Any new site-wide changes need to be analyzed. If a client changes their CSS, how does the page look, feel, etc. It’s always easy for an SEO to leave this measure out, though it’s a very important measure.
As I’ve been looking back on these sites, I’ve kept a running log of any change that I make to the page (e.g. changing a meta-tag, adjusting copy, etc.) A month later, I will look back to see what kind of results my SEO work did. This is a very simple technique to see where progress has been made in an SEO campaign, as well as where more improvement may be necessary.
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