Getting a Website Found Starts with Preparation

Knowledge is power, so start with the collection and analysis of key information:

• Business Needs Analysis - define the "conversion" goals for your site
• Technical and Visibility Analysis - check your site for industry best-practices like page naming, HTML tags, use of headers
• Competitive Analysis - know what sites appear for you keywords and why
• Keyword Forensics - what keywords are being used, and how often
• Baseline Ranking - where do you and your competitors show on a search engine results page (SERP)
• XML and Human Sitemaps - make sure both people and the search engines have a means to find all the valuable content on your site
• Robots.txt File - you can give the search engines instructions and they will treat you better if you do it right
• Website Analytics Interface and review of existing analytic data - you can't manage what you can't measure