- Analyzing how a website fits in its “web neighborhood” Viewing websites like an SEO
- Assessing good site architecture and webpages from an SEO perspective
- Assessing website content like an SEO
When people surf the Internet, they generally view each domain as its own island of information. This works perfectly well for the average surfer but is a big mistake for beginner SEOs. Websites, whether they like it or not, are interconnected. This is a key perspective shift that is essential for understanding SEO.
Take Facebook, for example. It started out as a “walled garden” with all of its content hidden behind a login. It thought it could be different and remain completely independent. This worked for a while, and Facebook gained a lot of popularity. Eventually, an ex-Googler and his friend became fed up with the locked-down communication silo of Facebook and started a wide open website called Twitter. Twitter grew even faster than Facebook and challenged it as the media darling. Twitter was smart and made its content readily available to both developers (through APIs) and search engines (through indexable content).
Facebook responded with Facebook Connect (which enables people to log in to Facebook through other websites) and opened its chat protocol so its users could communicate outside of the Facebook domain. It also made a limited amount of information about users visible to search engines. Facebook is now accepting its place in the Internet community and is benefiting from its decision to embrace other websites. The fact that it misjudged early on was that websites are best when they are interconnected. Being able to see this connection is one of the skills that separates SEO professionals from SEO fakes.
I highly recommend writing down everything you notice in a section of a notebook identified with the domain name and date of viewing.
In this chapter you learn the steps that the SEO professionals at SEOmoz go through either before meeting with a client or at the first meeting (depending on the contract). When you view a given site in the way you are about to learn in this chapter, you need to take detailed notes. You are likely going to notice a lot about the website that can use improvement, and you need to capture this information before details distract you.
Keep Your Notes Simple 
The purpose of the notebook is simplicity and the ability to go back frequently and review your notes. If actual physical writing isn’t your thing, consider a low-tech text editor on your computer, such as Windows Notepad or the Mac’s TextEdit.
Bare-bones solutions like a notebook or text editor help you avoid the distraction of the presentation itself and focus on the important issues—the characteristics of the web site that you’re evaluating.
If you think it will be helpful and you have Internet access readily available, I recommend bringing up a website you are familiar with while reading through this chapter. If you choose to do this, be sure to take a lot of notes in your notebook so you can review them later.