Website configuration management - setting the baseline

Website configuration management
Setting the baseline for natural search optimization

Search engines such as Google work to provide access to information or resources that individual users are seeking.  A major consideration is relevancy, and the matching mechanism used by Google depends upon key words and phrases.  The quest for useful search results involves much more than returning an undifferentiated list of topical relevancy.  It involves many other considerations such as timeliness, importance, and popularity, to name a few.  Google indicates that it employs more than two hundred factors in creating its search index.

Many of the factors considered by Google to determine the appropriateness and ranking of a particular web page in its search results are wholly within the control and discretion of the individual web master in charge and those who may contribute to the site's content.  More than a few of the factors relate to good web design practices that contribute to a satisfactory user experience.

Google provides a comprehensive and evolving set of design guidelines, best practices, and tools for crafting a web site that rates high on Google's own standard of quality.  Totally apart from a web site's content, its rank in Google's search results can be affected for better or worse based upon wholly technical considerations, and every reasonable effort should be made to conform to Google's quality guidelines.  As happens in judging figure skating competitions, a significant part of a final score consists of "technical merit."



Summary: Configuration management has the focus of establishing rational controls for significant changes to existing systems, whether they be software systems or business systems.  Since a typical small business website is a fairly static event, setting the baseline performance for the site  using Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics is a simple and inexpensive matter.  The idea is to capture actual search engine and web visitor behavior data before any changes are made to the website configuration, so that the effects of subsequent changes can be observed. This can be thought of as website configuration management by results.

If the purpose is to improve the business performance of a website by boosting its relevance to Google search, or natural search optimization, then to establish an existing baseline for the search results already being generated seems to be a reasonable priority.

Tom Fox
Louisville, Kentucky