Sep

Trust But Verify – Extreme SEO Makeover

written by yankeerudy

- September 17th, 2009

We’re in the home stretch of my Extreme SEO Makeover series, and this time we’re going to take a page from President Reagan’s Soviet Union playbook.

Trust but Verify your SEO work

As you work through your website optimizing pages, it is important to verify your efforts afterwards. Face it, we all know what we do is spotless and error-free, but even the best software programmers submit their work to be tested. (I hope…) Similarly, while you’re sure you did everything that needs doing it’s still a good idea to go back and review each page for SEO sweetness.

There are several tools out there that can evaluate how well a page is optimized for a particular keyword. One I’ve encountered is a free tool from Instant Position called SEO Doc Mini-Tester. You give it the URL and a keyword, and it gives a quickie score and “applause meter” graphic ranking your SEO efforts on a scale of 0-5.

To use this tool in your “Trust but Verify” efforts, enter each URL/keyword combination as you work through your page optimization. Don’t get terribly hung up on the raw scores (since the tool seems unable to recognize split keyword phrases) but rather shoot for ending up in the “Good” range of 4-5 points. Often, going from “Poor” or “OK” to “Good” can be achieved with a little editing of the Meta Title. (In fact, one page I optimized went from a 1 to a 5 simply by adding a single word to the title.)

President Reagan wanted to trust the agreements he hammered out with the Soviets but also wanted to verify that any non-compliance didn’t come back to blow up everything he stood for. Similarly, you want to trust your own work but verify that you don’t accidentally blow up your own search ranking and business objectives. (OK, it’s not my best metaphor work but it does tie everything together nicely.)