SEO Workflow

[7_Driver]

There's a huge amount of great info available on SEO, here, in software packages, books and Ebooks.

I've read a lot and learned a huge amount about the technical side of SEO - title tags, meta tags, link popularity, anchor text, page rank, <h> tags - that sort of thing.

There seems to be a lot less info around about the ORGANISATION side of an SEO campaign. It seems to me that staying highly organised is fundamental to the success of an SEO campaign - yet I haven't found much info about how people organise their workflow.

And while there are loads of software packages to help you optimise the pages - (and some submitting/reporting tools) - I haven't really seen something that supports the organisational side.

You know what I mean:

Which keywords are we targetting with which pages on which engines

which changes did we make in each version of each page

what is the current/best/worst rank achieved by every version of every page

what keyword density achieved the best results on this page

when did we last check the ranks of this page - and when are we due to check again

So how does everyone organise the huge amount of info needed for a proper SEO campaign? Have you written your own custom database software? Are there applications out there? Or do you just have a LARGE collection of Excel spreadsheets!

Any books cover this stuff? Has this been discussed before?

(Or is this just a complete non-issue for everyone else).

[simonuk]

I personally spend 1 to 2 hours a day Monday to Friday working on SEO for my clients. Then just before midnight GMT I download log files and check SE posistions. This normally takes another hour.

I don't bother writing down my processes because I've been doing the same things for almost 6 years so it's all routine for me.

The way I SEO has changed a lot but the actually time invlolved per day has remained a constant. Clients rise, software and experiments cut down time so it all evens out.

Simon.

[ritualcoffee]

sounds like you need a scorecard or dashboard to maintain your efforts. There are a couple pdfs and such out there that talk about methodology...

I have one that is entitled "scorecarding your share of search engines" but I can't remember who published it - do a search

[globalseo]

I have not seen anything like what you are looking for. Every person has a different set of steps they follow so I think it would be hard to maintain -- the person who can make it flexible will make some $$ though.

We keep all of the keywords in the the position checking tool. Any new words get added to the list and positions are added to the mix. Most of the tools keep a record of position changes over time. However, we only care where the page ranks today and if it is in the top 10 or not. We run those reports on a bi-weekly basis.

Page Changes -- we work for Fortune 100 clients who all have versioning software so we have a good trail of changes. Most are managed in a database so we change templates and copy. You could manage in a database pretty easy tracking by page.

[tfanelli]

You might try a program like Microsoft Project or another project management package. These can usually be customized to track many project variable.

[7_Driver]

Thanks guys,

I reckon putting the position checking program at the heart of the process - and then putting together a simple version control system sounds like the best solution for me.