13) What are site’s demographic target markets? (e.g. young urban females, working mothers, single parents etc.)

14) What are 20 search keywords or phrases that I think my/my client’s target markets will use to find site in search engines?

15) Who are my/my client’s major competitors online? What are their URLs? What keywords are they targeting?

16) Who are stake-holders of this site? How will I report to them?

17) Do I have access to site traffic logs or statistics to enable me to track visitor activity during campaign? Specifically, what visitor activity will I be tracking?

18) How do I plan on tracking my or my client’s rankings in search engines?

19) Do I or my client have ability and resources in place to respond to increased traffic/business as a result of campaign?

20) What are my/my client’s expectations for optimization campaign? Are they realistic?

Answers to first 10 questions above will determine how search engine-compatible site currently is and complexity of optimization required. For example, if site pages currently have little text on them, you know you’ll need to integrate more text to make site compatible with search engines and to be able to include your target keywords. If site currently uses frames, you will need to rebuild pages without frames or create special No-Frames tags to make sure site can be indexed, and so on.

This initial analysis will help you to scope time and costs involved in advance. For those of you optimizing client sites, obtaining accurate answers to these questions BEFORE quoting is absolutely crucial. Otherwise you can find yourself in middle of a project that you have severely under-quoted for and that’s very frustrating.

The remainder of questions are to establish in advance who, what, where, when, why and how of optimization campaign. This will help you determine most logical keywords and phrases to target, as well as which search engines and directories to submit site to and which sites to pursue reciprocal links with.

You’re Now Prepared!

So now you are clear about your motivations for optimizing site, you know more about target markets, you know how compatible existing site is with search engines and how much work is involved in search engine optimization process. You’re ready to tackle job!

Copyright © 2004 by Kalena Jordan. All rights reserved under U.S. and international law.

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia and New Zealand, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running her own SEO business Web Rank, Kalena manages Search Engine College, an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing subjects.

To see your most requested pages, look for graph or chart titled "Most Requested Pages" in your log files / site statistics. Also look for "Top Entry Pages".

5. Page refreshes

Why are visitors refreshing pages on your site? Are pages not loading properly? The "Page Refreshes" variable is another one to monitor on a monthly basis via your site stats to ensure that there are not site usability issues for visitors.

6. Referring Domains and Referring URLs

Where are your visitors coming from? Are they coming from sites that are linked to yours? Are blog authors or forum members talking about your site? Referring Domains will tell you what sites are linking to yours, while Referring URLs will list actual pages where links are located. These can be little gold mines because you can often find valuable sources of traffic via links to your site that you didn't even know existed.

In terms of an SEO campaign, these links can all add to your site's overall link popularity, an important factor in ranking algorithms of many search engines, particularly Google. Monitoring these metrics can tell you if your site requires a link-building campaign or help you measure effectiveness of various online and offline advertising campaigns.

In your log files / site statistics, Look for graph or chart titled "Referring Domains" and "Referring URLs".

7. Search Engine Referrals

How many of your visitors are coming directly from search engines? What percentage of overall traffic does this represent? This is a good variable to track to help you keep up with how many search engines are listing your site (both free submission and paid submissions), how much traffic they bring and whether to renew your paid submissions. It can also tell you whether you need to increase number of search engines your site is submitted to in order to build on your link popularity. As a a very rough guide, you should be receiving at least 30 percent of your site traffic via search engine referrals.

To see search engine referrals, look for a chart or graph called "Search Engines" within your site statistics.

8. Search Phrases

This topic is related to search engine referrals generally, but gives added insight into what terms you were actually found for in search engines. Do these terms match what your site was optimized for? Are there any surprising terms that you might want to develop site content for? Some log file analysis programs will even break down what specific phrases your site was found for in which particular search engines. The more detailed data you have, more closely you can tweak your optimization campaign to your precise market.

To see search phrases your site was found for, look for "Search Phrases" or "Search Phrases by "Search Engine".

9. Landing pages for PCC Campaigns, etc.

If you run a pay-per-click campaign or dedicate specific pages to advertising product specials, you may use special landing pages or tracking ids to monitor your traffic and conversions. Your site logs can help you track these by showing you how many visitors they each had and what they did after they visited those pages.

10. Metric values that show a radical change from developing trends

Any site metrics that show a dramatic change from one month to next could pin-point a problem with your site or with your optimization campaign. For example, if your search engine referrals have dropped dramatically, it could indicate that you have been penalized in a search engine (or more than one). Noticing changing trends early gives you chance to investigate problem areas and make adjustments if necessary.

Please note that all log file analysis and site statistics programs are different and use slightly different terms to describe metrics listed above. If you're confused, ask your site admin or hosting provider to highlight these for you.

Remember, your log files are gold mines filled with nuggets of information about your optimized web site. If you keep digging on a regular basis, you'll eventually strike it rich with success.

Copyright © 2005 by Kalena Jordan. All rights reserved under U.S. and international law.

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running her own SEO business, Web Rank, Kalena manages Search Engine College, an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing subjects.