Mar 15 2012

What Website Pages Should You Optimize First?

Optimizing a website for SEO is no small task, regardless of how many pages a website has. However, for owners of large websites, the onsite optimization process can take months to complete. Unless you have a team of SEO consultants each working 40 hours a week on keyword research, content optimization, Meta tag and Meta description writing and so forth, the road to a fully optimized website is going to take a long time. While you can’t really speed up the process without compromising the quality of your onsite SEO, there are a few ways to make sure you are getting the most value for your time.

Optimize the high level pages.

Using your high level navigation bar as a guideline, start the onsite process by focusing on all your high level pages. These pages, especially your homepage, are probably the ones with the most inbound links (something you can confirm with a link audit), meaning they are more valuable in the eyes of the search engines. Even if you haven’t been actively engaged in any link building activities, natural links will occur overtime, especially if those pages have useful and well-written content. You want to optimize these pages first because they probably target broader keywords (a page that targets “SEO services” versus a page that targets “SEO services for e-commerce websites,” for instance) and most likely gets the majority of your visitors right now and attract a wider target audience. You want potential visitors to be able to find these pages in the search engines for related keywords and use them to click deeper into the rest of your site.

Optimize best revenue generating pages.

These are the pages that perform the best on your website—they get the most visitors, keep them engaged for a long time and have the best conversion rate. These pages are what help your business grow online! Since these pages tend to have a direct impact on the amount of revenue your website is generating, they are well worth your time. In many cases, a well-performing page only needs minimal onsite SEO changes to perform that much better. Think about it—if an un-optimized page is doing a great job as is it means probably means the content is incredibly well-written and is naturally targeting the right keywords. A few more onsite elements is just going to enhance it.

Optimize most profitable product pages.

These pages may not consistently generate the most revenue for your website, but they have the potential to be your company’s most profitable. These might be the product pages for some of your most expensive products, or maybe they are the products that your company wants to rely more heavily on in the future as they away from old product lines. These might also be pages built to create demand generation around an entirely new product with unique terminology exclusive to your brand. These pages should be optimized towards the beginning of the process because they are the future of your website and it make take time to get them performing well in the search engines.

When it comes to optimizing a large website with thousands of pages it all comes down to value. Which pages are going to be the most valuable to your company in the long run once they are optimized? These are the ones you should be concentrating on in the initial months of your onsite SEO. You don’t want to wait until every page is 100% optimized before launching the new pages—roll out the changes as they come and let those individual pages shine in the search engines!

About the Author – Nick Stamoulis

Nick Stamoulis is the President of Brick Marketing a Boston SEO services company. With nearly 13 years of Internet Marketing experience, Nick Stamoulis shares his SEO knowledge by posting SEO best practice tips to the Brick Marketing Blog.

Contact Nick Stamoulis at 781-999-1222 or nick@brickmarketing.com

4 Responses to “What Website Pages Should You Optimize First?”

  1. Neelam Sharma says:
    March 15, 2012 at 11:02 pm

    Thanks for sharing good blog for optimization of a website.
    I am from development department of SEO tool “Minalzyer”. To get ranking high in search engine one have to ensure proper health of their website. Minalyzer analyze your website and give you proper information about the deficiencies exist at your website.

    It generates many reports such as broken links, server response code errors, missing meta data, keywords, duplicate content, HTML code errors and more. This helps you to manage your website in a proper way.

    Supported platforms are Windows, Linux and Mac OS X – http://www.minalyzer.com/minalyzer-download.html

  2. Jessica Palson says:
    March 18, 2012 at 6:53 pm

    These are some great tips on optimization. I honestly don’t have a team helping me and I’ve spent a lot of hours this week just optimizing my pages on my blogs. On top of writing original content, it’s exhausting! Haha.

  3. mini account index says:
    March 21, 2012 at 9:27 pm

    Optimizing a website page I am a bit tiring. In blog comments, you should put a certain page or homepage link? Which is better?

  4. Deepak Kumar Das says:
    April 7, 2012 at 2:35 am

    My idea is to make complete onpage suggestion to the site all pages using all the Unique phrases and information.

    Webmaster always made a mistake of confusing search engines with different pages targeted with the same keywords.

    You can rank well once you will have unique metas and title tags for the whole site.