100% Organic: The Science Of Scoring Your SEO

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The Science Of Scoring Your SEO
**

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by Stephan Spencer
**

SEO is an art. (Hence, the name of my and my co-authors brand new
book, The Art of SEO
<http://www.amazon.com/Art-SEO-Theory-Practice/dp/0596518862>
). Crafting copy that sells, as well as ranks, is an art. So is link
baiting. But SEO is also a science. Crafting rewrite rules, robots.txt
directives, and so forth is pretty geeky stuff. The science side of
SEO is where I spend most of my time.

Another dichotomy is that SEO is both subjective and objective. The
point at which a title tag, URL, or headline is good enough and thus
moving on to the next task is warranted  that is certainly
subjective. Also consider what might comprise the most optimal URL
structure? Does it end in / (slash) or a file extension like .html?
Again, subjective.

In my view, SEO for the most part is cut-and-dry, its objective.
Thats because it can all be boiled down to an algorithm, and in fact,
it already has. The algorithm I speak of, of course, is Googles (or
Yahoos, or Bings). The SEO practitioners challenge is to
reverse-engineer that algorithm to the best of their ability. But it
shouldnt stop there. Why not write your own algorithm  an
approximation of the search engines own algorithm, one that teases
out the various signals and accurately assesses the quality, relevance
and importance of these signals without human intervention/assistance?

Running algorithmic analysis on a site-by-site and a page-by-page
basis will then allow you to ascertain a sites SEO health, and more
importantly, the subsequent actions required in this never-ending
process known as optimization. That is data-driven decision-making, my
friends, and it will be a key driver in the next stage in the
evolution of SEO.

To be effective, SEO scoring has to get granular. Knowing you scored
an 89 out of 100, or a B+, overall with your SEO may be reassuring,
but there werent any next steps that followed from that knowledge.
The same is true even if you individually score each of the major SEO
areas of focus. In my SEO Report Card
<http://www.practicalecommerce.com/member/3-Stephan-Spencer/articles>
column for Practical Ecommerce, I (arbitrarily) chose the following
areas of focus: Home Page Content, Inbound Links and PageRank,
Indexation, Internal, Hierarchical Linking Structure, HTML Templates
and CSS, Secondary Page Content, Keyword Choices, Title Tags, and
URLs. I dont claim that these are the best buckets. Nonetheless,
scoring such broad areas is still not actionable, really.

Score the title tags, internal anchor text, keyword prominence, H1s,
meta descriptions and so forth separately, and on a page-by-page
basis, and now youre talking!

SEO effectiveness can be deconstructed into its many components. It
can be benchmarked against competitors. Inferences can be made,
priorities can be set, content can be massaged, link juice can be
directed. Consequently, the SEO practitioner relies less on their gut
and more on the data to drive their actions.

One enterprise-level SEO scoring technology that supports such a
data-driven approach to SEO is Covarios Organic Search Insight
<http://www.covario.com/products_organic_search_insight.shtml>
 which gets so granular that components of navigation, URLs and so
forth are assessed (as can be seen in the screenshot below). Craig
MacDonald, VP of Marketing and Product Management told me The impact
analysis can also be statistically modeled, based on gathering data
across many sites over time in order to ascertain the relationship
between changes in factors and�the impact of those relative factors on
the various search engines � i.e., the science can be rigorously
applied. From that, specific recommendations are automatically made
and prioritized.

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/23148333@N06/4055074288/>

(click to view full size)

SEO is a moving target, one that is heavily dependent on algorithm
shifts, site changes/updates, the competitive landscape in which one
operates, etc. As such, you must continuously monitor and evaluate,
ideally with an automated tool. In fact, such a tool is mandatory if
you have a large site and you want your SEO activities to be scalable.
With this monitoring in place, a page element (like a meta
description) that goes AWOL can be flagged and the issue addressed
(e.g. internal resources deployed) much faster than would be otherwise
possible. Even better if the webmaster can be flashed warnings prior
to making site modifications that will be detrimental to SEO.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the author, and not
necessarily Search Engine Land.

Stephan Spencer
<http://searchengineland.com/author/stephan-spencer/>

is founder and president of natural search marketing firm
Netconcepts <http://www.netconcepts.com>
and inventor of the GravityStream <http://www.gravitystream.com>
SEO proxy technology. He's currently authoring the upcoming O'Reilly
book /The Art of SEO/ along with co-authors Rand Fishkin, Jessie
Stricchiola, and Eric Enge.

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