How to measure the success of SEO efforts?

Most people answer that it has to be "Keyword rankings". Keyword ranks have to improve across all search engines, with a focus on "Google" because google garners a major share of the search across most countries.

Well and good, from an optimizser's point of view, because keyword ranks is what he/she has control on. However, think of it from a business' perspective.

For a business, keyword ranks is a means to an end. The "end" being higher organic traffic. Then, should the measure of SEO success be organic traffic and NOT keyword rankings?

This paradigm shift in thinking can change how SEO is done in its entirety. Should it be about picking 200 keywords and making sure the site ranks in top 10 for all of them? or should it be about making sure that you deliver incremental organic traffic quarter over quarter. The latter could mean just optimizing on top 10 keywords and making sure you are number one in all of them, among other things.

This is just food for thought. More later.

Is Google directory a clone of DMoz?

It was only a few days back that I was checking out the Google directory, and to my surprise, I found that the entries mirror those in DMoz, listing by listing, word by word. That triggered me to venture out and understand more about it.

The relationship seems to be quire clear, with google carrying dmoz links on its directory's home page http://directory.google.com/ and the internet full of sites talking about a regular dump that google takes from dmoz.

Jean Manco has a very good commentary on this subject by the title "google and dmoz - are they in love" at this location http://jean.manco.googlepages.com/googleanddmoz. It is an interesting read.

Why DMoz listing is important?

Think of it, SEO is all about making sure that the search engine gives due importance to your web content (web site or blog) in search engine rankings or its SERPs (search engine result pages).

Search engines like Google, Yahoo etc automatically crawl your website for content and have little or no human involvement in understanding your content quality and relevance to its domain, title and meta, which can all be stuffed with keywords just to promote the site.

On the other hand, a listing in DMoz is a test of patience and site quality. One needs to manually submit the site to the irectory, where each content category has its own editor. You cannot submit content to more than one category and cannot get an anchor text for SEO. The editor will visit your site and then only approve the site for listing.

With such high level of validation, it is only wise that search engines give due weightage to a DMoz listing.

Most people whom I know and I myself, till some time back, thought of SEO (search engine optimization) as an activity which has to start once the site is live.
But I couldn't have been farther away from truth.

Elaborate readings and my own personal experience now tells me that the few most important parameters to stand out in search engine rankings are

a) Domain Name
b) Age of the domain
c) Data Center location

Incidentally none of these is dependent on the site going live. In fact the domain name could date as much behind as the seeds of the idea in the mind of the entrepreneur.

Let's have a look at these in more detail:-

a) Domain Name - Almost all search engines give a huge weightage to the name of the domain. The domain name should be central to the business concept for effective contribution to organic search rankings. Simplifying this, indianstockmarket.com is a much better domain name for any content business around the stock markets than 5minutesto10.com which is the time at which the market opens.

b) Age of the domain - the older the domain, the better. So the entrepreneur should book the domain as soon as he gets a first hang of his inclination to open a corresponding business. In the time between the domain buying at the site going live, the domain could be used to host a relevant blog to have organic traffic, incoming links and page rank even before the start of the business

c) Data Center Location (and the tld on the domain name) - Local search engines rank local sites higher. Let me explain this with an example. Google.co.in will rank a site hosted in India or have a .in tld higher than a .com site or a site hosted out of country, all other metrics being the same
The country specific google is important because thats the default search engine that opens when you try to access google.com.

Good for now, more on my experiments with SEO in the next post.

Next Post: Dmoz, google directory and entry in google webmaster tools