Search Marketing Insomniac…The Blog of Adam Henige

You can’t pinch your pennies enough these days, or pinch them at all if you’re working with a broken hand as I am…ANYHOW, I figured it was about time for another quick hitting edition of SEO On A Nickel - so all of my penny pinching fans feel free to rejoice! No lengthy diatribe, typing with one finger doesn’t lend itself to verbose blogging.

What I want to cover today is extremely important. If you’ve never really laid out a strategy for your SEO work, or you’re just getting started, it’s extremely important that you assess your current state, and the state of those pages occupying the SERPs you desire.

There are some sweet paid tools that will do this for you - like SEOMoz Labs’ Linkscape Visualizer. This very succinctly details how you stack up to a competitor.

We've got a ways to go to catch SEOMoz...those rascals!

If you’re not familiar with SEOMoz, they have their own metrics (thus the names), but the basic concepts from this can be done with other tools to give direction to your SEO efforts.  Some things to look at, and the tools to compare them:

• Inbound links - Yahoo site Explorer is the easiest tool for this task.  Look at the link profile of the ranking page, as well as the domain.  The page may have few links, but might be ranking out on the strength of internal links from a very powerful domain.  Also, be sure you compare apples to apples, having 50 links from the same domain is far different than 50 links from unique domains.  If your links all come from only a few sites, you’ll want to add that to your list of priorities.
• Trust - This is a bit more difficult, but if you have MORE links than a competitor, trust could be an issue.  Link Diagnosis will show you the Google PageRanks of sites linking in.  If you have a bunch of PR1 and PR2 pages and your competitor has a few 5 and 6s…it’s time to get some more authoritative links.
• Internal links - Site Explorer works well for this task, too.  Are you getting the most out of your own site?  Sometimes just by optimizing internal links you can make a major move.  If you see a target page is lacking in internal links, start there.

Essentially, if you perform the above tasks and make yourself a checklist, you can figure out your greatest deficiencies before moving forward.  If you’re trying to save a few bucks in your marketing efforts, this will definitely be a step towards efficiency.