SEO Site Checking Tools...
The following tools are a selection of the most useful freely available resources available on the Internet and which mirror the professional tools used by our expert SEO suppliers:
- To check for Site Performance on 6 top search engines. A series of very useful tools for checking your website's performance against a keyphrase can be found at: http://www.marketleap.com. Run this tool for each keyphrase relevant to your business.
- To check how important Google thinks you are
- use the Google PageRank tool bar which can be downloaded from google.com/support.
This tool is important and one of the easiest ways to gauge if Google likes your site or even knows if you exist. Toolbar PageRank (TBPR) can be best summarised as a snapshot view of Google's perceived importance of a website, as judged by others linking to it, relative to the others in its index. On a decile scale - it's a score out of ten.
- A greyed-out box suggests problems, zero suggests it could be a new site and/or in sand-box (a much disputed phrase that effectively denotes limbo-land for businesses in competitive sectors that can last for up to nine months).
- A low score suggests no detailed optimisation has been undertaken.
- Scores of 8 or above are rare and generally unless other analysis reveals downwards trends, nothing further would be recommended from an optimisation perspective unless you have very tough competition, or big targets and deep pockets.
- In practice, we recommend clients delve deeper than this simple tool to assess if a website has underlying problems (such as a decline in visits by Google robots) - which is where SEO Brokers can help. And please don't be tempted to try and build links cheaply by joining link-networks - it usually ends in tears.
- To check site Performance try TrafficEstimate.com - a quick and easy site to gauge traffic through competitor sites. The data is most consistent if you use it to gauge comparisons between similar businesses rather than absolute numbers. For your own site, accurate stats can be best obtained from web logs but this tool is still relevant for comparison purposes. Go directly to Alexa.com for bigger sites. Here you can assess how popular a site is globally, locally and can see trends such as Reach (proportion of audience visiting a site), Page Views (how long they stay) and Rank, which is a measure of combined popularity. NB: In all cases these results will be slightly skewed as the data originates from an audience with a slight technical demographic bias.
- To check Competitiveness in pure number terms, the easiest way to gauge keyphrase competitiveness is to type it into Google which will show the number of similar matches. Phrases with in excess of 300,000 results are generally considered by optimisers to be very competitive. To gauge the financial impact, ie, how many businesses are chasing said words, it is useful to look at the bid-prices paid by Pay Per Click advertisers, (SEO should typically beat PPC investment by a margin of around 7:1) and Overture.com have a easy to use (but hidden tool) for advertisers or you can also open a similar account with Google Adwords. With Google, you need to 'cut-n-paste' the required keyphrase in as a new campaign (don't set a restrictive budget). For reference, a Click Through Rate of around 1% is pretty typical in our experience if you are calculating CPA. Care should however be taken with results as these companies presumably want to push you towards Paid For (PPC) advertising - so who knows the extent to which data or commentary may be biased.