Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

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It’s been three months now. You can probably start to formulate the kind of con-

fident cause-and-effect analysis that looks like this:

• After our optimization efforts caused a boost in rankings, our rankings have

stayed relatively stable.

• Even though our optimization efforts took place in June, our ranks continue to

fluctuate. This is due to the high level of competitiveness of the keywords we are

tracking.

• Still no top-30 ranks in Google, even for our company name. It’s probable that

we are still sandboxed!

Feel free to add a liberal sprinkling of qualifying words like

probably

instead of

certainly

and

unlikely

instead of

definitely not

. These words are staples in the SEO

expert’s repertoire of reporting verbiage. Sure, one day the algorithms may come out of

hiding and your competitors may send you a bulleted list of their most recent SEO

activities, but until then, it’s perfectly fine to make educated guesses.

Indexed Pages

If you were a diligent slacker and haven’t been checking your site’s indexed pages, slack

no more! It’s worth at least a quarterly check.

If any of your landing pages were not indexed when you checked last month, or

if you didn’t see one or more of your landing pages in the search results during your

manual rank checks, verify that each one is indexed in all four search engines now. If a

page should get knocked out of a search engine’s index, it could mean a significant loss

in potential traffic for you, so it’s important to catch it now.

Now:

Check the indexing of your landing pages. Document status on your Rank Tracking Worksheet.

Now:

Check the total number of pages indexed on your site in each of the four major search engines.

Record the value on your Rank Tracking Worksheet.

Now:

Add your summary and analysis to the “Site Visibility” section of your Quarterly Report.

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