SEO 101 – How to fix a fever without a thermometer

Here's a guest post from Birla - Asklaila's CTO. For your reading pleasure ...

How to fix a fever without a thermometer

Yes. You got it right. You can’t. We know that thermometer is no wonder drug to fix fever but an essential part of fixing it. In fact it is pretty much the starting point. I am assuming you are past the stage where you have realized how important SEO can be to you as an online business and have decided to do something about it. Let me help you to get started.

So first things is to measure where you are. There are few important metrics which need to be measured. Broadly you can classify the metric into three segments.

Users, Site and Search Engines.

In this post I will focus on talking about measuring Search Engines. Measuring SEs enable you to track your visibility to millions of audience for hom SEs are the starting points of their Internet experience.

Index Size
This gives you an idea of how many documents of your website are visible to search engines. You can easily find it by giving “site:domain-name.com” as query to your favourite search engine.

Index Size Breakup
It is not sufficient to just see overall index size but you should also break it up by the different type of pages you have in your site. Eg. If you are a retail site, you might have pages which show multiple products and you might have pages which show complete details of a single product. It is important for you to understand how search engines look at different type of pages on your site.

You might also have the type of pages broken up by geography or categories. You should also breakup your index size from those perspectives.

Inlinks
Election time and you need to track how many people have voted for you on the internet. Inlinks monitoring does that for you. You should also do some more analysis on the quality of sites which link to you. Sorting them by their Alexa rank can help you a little bit to understand the quality.

Cache
You should always look at how search engines view you by looking at their cached pages.

Automation
It is important that you automate the entire process of generating these metrics. It is simple and straightforward and any scripting language can help you write this in few days ( or may be hours if your programming skills are less rusty than mine )

Relative Grading
Being an IIT student, one thing I learned (unfortunately hard way) that it is not just sufficient to do well but also do well relative to your surroundings. This is like measuring the body temperature to 100 degree Farenheit but not knowing what the ideal body temperature should be. Obviously you are not going to get any idea of your fever just with measurement. It is important to measure regularly and measure your peers also. Since public APIs are available for tracking all this, you can track this for any site. A good idea is to figure out your competition and track all the parameters for all of them. Make sure that you store all the parameters in a database so that you can do long term analysis. Analyzing this for a large number of sites also ensures that you can also normalize anomalies which are very common in numbers reported by search engines.

So now you have all the keys to test drive your new car, enjoy the drive..... and do not forget to share your experiences.