Ever wondered how some SEO specialists make a conclusive analysis in a minute or two on whether a site is ranking well or not? I call it SEO sense – it is the ability to know each and every little detail about a website and use it to come to a certain conclusion of a site’s SEO. First of all, HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!! I thought this article would be a great way to start the year, as I have been talking about this endlessly with my team for the past year. I have been reading the book Outliers and Blink which finally helped me write this article on SEO sense. Have been using the term ‘court sense’ with my team, which is derived from basketball.
Wikipedia defines court sense as: “A player’s awareness of everything that is occurring in the game.” I realized that it connotes a lot about what the sense of SEO is, except that the sense of SEO is, of course, all about SEO. Practice makes perfect, but above all, practice develops your unconscious Australia Phone Number decision-making abilities. Deciding on instinct is not uncommon in business. Being able to tell yourself ‘why’ you made that gut decision is often more difficult. Our brain can process a large amount of information at once and make a decision without our conscious level being able to tell how it came to a conclusion; the unconscious gathering of this data from practice and experience is called “fine cutting”.
But Make Sure These Aren’t Low-quality
Fine slicing can only happen if you have the experience and practice to extract real data that your brain has stored in memory. The fine cut makes your SEO sense what it is. All in the blink of an eye ‘SEO Sense’ is knowing exactly what to do in the right situation at the right time. It has the potential to direct your SEO strategy. You can get your creative juices going if you need some. It can help you write your next article, record your next video, or record your next podcast. Overwrite your decisions from data in your subconscious. Sometimes we are forced to make decisions that need to be made in a second or two.
Thank God we have much more time in SEO. The problem is that it is more difficult to come to a precise conclusion and we have a lot of things to ‘know’ before we can come to one. So how do you develop your SEO sense? Browse tons of websites – study what makes them tick. A website is a huge interconnection of numerous factors: design, puns, voice, brand, URL, domain age, backlinks, outbound links, etc. It’s a huge jungle of data and you need to familiarize yourself with what makes all those factors common. and to what extent they can vary, and how they all affect SEO, each in their own way. Get started with the tools you’ll need to collect data. Use SEOQuake if you use Chrome or SEO for Firefox if you use Mozilla Firefox.
Look at All the Outbound Links the Site Is Giving Away.
Become familiar with the metrics that these plugins allow you to see. Take a look at your onsite optimization and ask yourself these questions: Blink of an EyeDo they have many outgoing links? If so, what kind of outgoing links are they? Sources? Nofollow links? Do they have a lot of cluttered title tags? Or do you segregate your target keywords by title tag per page? Do they consciously insert their keywords into their content? It’s obvious? Do they write content for their users or for search engines? Knowing all these things, is it working for them? Do they rank well for your target keywords? If you’re not familiar with all the onsite optimization factors, you should check out our full guide to onsite optimization at SEO School.
