Search Engine Rankings

For this task, you will perform a manual rankings check on the major search engines for all of your top target keywords.

With your before-and-after ranks side by side, it’s easy to see what changes have occurred. If you were starting from zero or you had some easy fixes in your optimization, you may have some exciting improvement in ranks. If you aren’t seeing the improvements you’ve been hoping for, take heart. Read the sidebar “It’s a Marathon, Not a Sprint” for thoughts on SEO timing.

In this section, summarize your current standings as compared to the Prep Month. Here are some examples:

• We gained top 30 listings on MSN for three of our target keywords.

• We have a new #2 listing for the term “novelty napkin holders” on Yahoo!.

Next, put on your thinking cap and flesh out these bare-bones facts with some juicy analysis. How do these changes compare with the goals you established in the Prep Month? What could be done to improve any less-than-pleasing situations? Possible analysis might look like this:

• We gained top 30 listings on MSN for three of our target keywords. Our text optimization probably had something to do with this.

• We have a new #2 listing for the term “novelty napkin holders” on Yahoo!.

However, the listing contains unflattering text from our customer forum. Stymied about what to say? Think about who will be reading this report and try to imagine what questions they’ll have. For example, if this is primarily for your own edification, your analysis might take the form of questions or a to-do list, such as, “Is it possible to improve this listing? If not, I should look into excluding the customer forum using the robots.txt file.” If this is for your boss who is dubious about your SEO efforts, your analysis might take the form of educational tidbits, such as, “Seeing the customer forum in the #2 position indicates that there are no problems with the search engines finding and indexing our deep pages. This is good news, but I will look into how to improve the quality of this listing.” As your experience with reporting continues, you will become more and more adept at this sort of SEO rumination.

Indexed Pages

In addition to monitoring search engine ranks for your top keywords, we recommend checking the total number of pages indexed.

Why record the total number of pages indexed on a regular basis? For one, if you previously had obstacles to robot indexing on your site, you’re likely to see a great deal of improvement here once those obstacles are removed. Ditto if you’ve been adding lots of new content. If you’re watching page indexing closely, you may have a special interest in robot activity. With a little sleuthing, you can see which search engine robots have visited your site.

Listing Quality

Whenever we’re called upon to get a very quick sense of a site’s presence on search engines, we perform a site: search and assess the quality of the listings. You already know the total number of pages that are indexed on your site. Now, give them a onceover for quality. Are the listings compelling and clickable? Does each page have a unique listing? How is your branding? Your status report should call out any improvements or trouble spots.

I Hate Paperwork!

Do you hear that? Our eye-rolling detector is beeping! Someone out there is about to complain that all this documentation is useless!

In our opinion, the SEO Status Report is a cornerstone of a well-balanced plan.Why? Because we firmly believe that data is useless unless it’s interpreted in a meaningful way.

A seasoned SEO professional confesses,“One of my first SEO projects was when I worked at a web development firm, and SEO was an add-on to building a website.With SEO being a new service,we had no established system for documenting or reporting on this work. I diligently performed all the tasks for the initial discovery phase of the project: choosing keywords, assessing the site and its competitors, and making recommendations for next steps.With each of these tasks, I worked closely with our client and e-mailed him all of the related data.

“At the end of the project,my boss (who didn’t know SEO but certainly knew business best practices!) suggested that I put together a final report.What did I do? I printed out my previous documents and data, stapled them all together, and slapped on a title page.

“What a disaster! The client had nothing to show his boss, nobody wanted to wade through the data, and I wasted more time re-explaining everything I had done than I would have spent writing up a summary in the first place.Worse, all of the added value from my work the thought, research, discussion, and analysis that had gone into our choices was lost!

“Luckily, the client was forgiving. But I learned a hard lesson with that project: Document what you do and write it with a close eye on your intended audience!”

Have you guessed yet that the SEO pro quoted here is one of the authors? Lucky for you, you can learn from our mistakes! The point of this week is not just to document your work, but also to do the analysis and mental sifting that allows you to write about it intelligently.The way you tell your SEO story is what will ultimately separate you from the SEO hacks and newbies out there.Your SEO Status Report is a team-builder, a boss-pleaser, and a mental reinforcement for your SEO learning curve, all wrapped in a sensible white-inkjet-bond-paper bow.

Check Links

Today, you’ll follow up on the link-building campaign that you started a few weeks ago. You made a few link submittals, but what happened next? Did you go for an hour-a-week campaign, or did you go for one of the less intensive options we described? Whatever your approach, it’s important to keep track of your link-building activities and accomplishments in a summary report. You’ll document the following in both words and numbers: link-building activities and Google PageRank.