Top priority pages should be the ones that your visitors will most naturally gravitate to, such as
your home page, or pages that will generate the most in terms of traffic or revenue. When prioritizing
pages, you’re also creating a roadmap for your marketing efforts. If three of the pages on your
site are your top priority, those three will have the lion’s share of time, capital, and effort when it
comes to SEO and marketing.
Site assessment
After you have prioritized your site, you should assess where you stand and where you need to be
with your current SEO efforts. Again, assess each page individually, rather than the site as a whole.
In SEO, individual pages are equally important (if not more so) than the entire site. All of your
efforts are designed to rank one page above all others in search results. Which page is the most
important should be determined by your business needs.
Your SEO assessment should be a document that outlines the current standing of the main SEO
elements of each page. It should contain columns for the element of the site you’re assessing, the
current status of that element, what needs to be improved in that element, and the deadline for
improvement. It’s also helpful if you have a check box next to each item that can be marked when
improvements are completed and a column for follow-up, because SEO is a never-ending process.
The elements that should be considered during an assessment include:
- Site/page tagging: The meta tags that are included in the coding of your web site are
essential to having that site listed properly in a search engine. Tags to which you should
pay specific attention are the title tags and description tags, because these are the most
important to a search engine.
- Page content: How fresh is your content? How relevant is it? How often is it updated? And
how much content is there? Content is still important when it comes to search results. After
all, most people are looking for a specific piece of content, whether it’s information or a
product. If your content is stale, search engines could eventually begin to ignore your site in
favor of a site that has fresher content. There are exceptions to this generalization, however.
And one exception is if your content is, by nature, very rich but not very dynamic. Because
of the usefulness of the content, your site will probably continue to rank well. But it’s a difficult
case to determine. In most cases, fresh content is better.
- Site links: Site links are essential in SEO. Crawlers and spiders look for the links into
and out of your site in order to traverse your site and collect data on each URL. However,
they also look for those links to be in-context, meaning the link must come from or lead
to a site that is relevant to the page that is being indexed. Broken links tend to be a large
problem when it comes to search engine ranking, so be sure to check that links are still
working during the assessment process.
- Site map: Believe it or not, a site map will help your web site be more accurately linked.
But this is not the ordinary site map that you include to help users quickly navigate through
your site. This site map is an XML-based document, at the root of your HTML, that contains
information (URL, last updated, relevance to surrounding pages, and so on) about each
of the pages within a site. Using this XML site map will help to ensure that even the deep
pages within your site are indexed by search engines. If you don’t have a site map, you
should create one. If you do have one, make sure it’s accurate and up to date.
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