After you confirm the quality of the content, check if it’s optimized to gain traffic through search results on major search engines. The closer your site is to the top of the search results, the more people will view the site. This is often true, as people frequently click on sites ranked towards the top of the page first and work their way down. The following offers some key points to look for in the SEO of the website you are looking to purchase.
Find out What the Current and Potential Rankings Are for This Website
There are helpful sites that can show the potential amount of traffic available for a URL. These websites also display the keyword for a specific page and what position – such as page number 310 on a search engine site. Besides finding the rank of a particular website, they can also display the search volume. Many such SEO tools will also give the top keyword that enables the website’s current position when being searched. You can get basic information for free. However, for more in-depth data, you often have to pay a small fee.
It is frequently difficult to justify buying a website ranked low on lists produced by search engines, but low-ranking doesn’t mean the site isn’t worth the money. It all depends on what you can do with the site, renovations to increase the property value, once you have purchased it.
Look for the Current Number of Backlinks
Having many backlinks will boost a site higher in the search engine rankings. There are many plugins available for checking the number of sites linking back to your own. Many sites fail because of too much competition within the same niche. Knowing the number of backlinks to your would-be competitors’ websites will help you calculate how many you will need to gain to rank in the search engines.
What is the SERP Competition?
It’s also good to know what sites are ranking above your website. To learn the quality of their SEO, you can use Google to see what the competition is like by typing in a shared keyword for your prospective purchase. Then view the top ranking sites on the search engine results page. Some similar tools are free and some are not. Most will provide domain backlinks, page backlinks, Google PR, age of the domain, and various other rankings. However, the Firefox SEO plugin, described below, is one of the most recommended tools by many website owners.
How Is the On-page Optimization for This Site?
OPO (On Page Optimization) will help a website get high rankings all on its own. However, it may depend on the competitiveness of the keyword or phrase. Link building is also part of this – they complement one another and this is how the site can become more successful. Generally, OPO will bring in many natural links – which can easily multiply exponentially when combined with engaging content.
Using the Firefox Seo Plug-in
This plugin can do all the above checks for the website you intend to purchase. You’ll quickly discover meta tags, keyword density, and indexed pages. It even provides a link report, sitemap, and list of backlinks. This is great for checking the keyword density on the website you are looking to buy. For instance, if you know of a specific keyword that is causing a similar page to rank high on the search engine lists, you can plug this into the keyword density tool. This part of the SEO plugin will show the number of matches on your website for this keyword. It searches the entire page; title, body, headings, links, bold print, Meta description, and Meta keywords. If there are matches present, it displays the percentage off to the side as an indication of the traffic you could attract….
*Originally published on WorldStart June 02, 2010
