DeadFly SEO

Before starting any search engine optimisation I like to get a base line, i.e. where is that site now - think of it as a balance sheet, (oh, a previous life). How many visitors is the web site getting just now, what key words or phrases are customers using to find you, and what ones do you want to be found for.

A great free tool for this base line is Google sitemaps. It is free, just go here and www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ register or login using any Google account. You don’t need to know HTML to see this up, but you do need ftp access. Just follow the instruction, it is fairly easy.

This is one of the reports that Google will produce for you:

Top search queries The top Google search queries in which your site appeared. %: % of top queries
# % Query Position
1 66% west highland way 3
2 8% walking scotland 8
3 7% walking in scotland 4
4 3% whw 8
5 3% westhighland 8
6 2% the west highland way 4
7 2% highland way 9
8 1% inverarnan accommodation 4
9 1% hill walking in scotland 10
10 1% way west 5
11 1% west highland way walk 9
12 1% milngavie 32
13 1% “west highland way” 4
14 1% west highland way scotland 7
15 1% scotland walking 8
16 1% hill walking scotland 10
17 1% west highland 14
18 1% westhighland way 6
19 1% milngavie train times 9
20 1% west highland way route 10

This report is from one of my own sites West Highland Way this illustrates a search table, information that I can also get in a different format from Google Analytics. These are the main key words or key phrases that visitors are using to find my web site - pretty much what I expected. If I wanted to make this site bigger at any time and get more traffic I can choose the term “Milngavie” for example. I can see that the site is listing for this search term, not something that I was bothered about, it is the town out side of Glasgow where the West Highland Way starts. So I would just take this term and do some research to see what people are searching for about Milngavie - that simple really.

More later on Google sitemaps and how you can use it to watch your SEO at work and how much Google likes or dislikes your web site.