Website Grader - A free search engine optimization (SEO)/marketing tool

Posted on July 25, 2007 at 4:14 pm

If you have your own web site or blog, it’s always good to know where you can improve the SEO aspects of your site so that you rank better in the SERPs. There are a few good tools out there that you can use to get specific recommendations for your site. I really like Website Grader because it checks many aspects of a site’s overall ranking including the site structure, meta tag usage, head tag usage, image summary, age of the domain, Google PageRank, Alexa rank, Technorati rank, readability of site, and inbound links.

Another cool thing you can do with this tool is add in a couple of competing web sites and see how well your site is doing compared to theirs! A great way to see how you can make yourself catch up to the competition. You can also put in some related keywords and Website Grader will tell you how you rank for those particular keywords.

Once you run the report, you’ll get something like this:

I ran the tool on TechCrunch and as you can see just about everything is accurate except for the Google Indexed Pages! They have over 11,000 pages in Google’s index. For my site, the number was accurate, so I’m not sure why it’s off for this site.

The page structure section gives you any warnings about your meta tags and HTML code. TechCrunch, for example, does not use the Meta-Keywords tag on their site (something I have seen a lot of the top sites doing). Also, if you’re using too many keywords in your site or keywords that spiders won’t like, it’ll let you know.

In the heading summary, you’ll get a list of your top headings and sub-headings that would be seen by readers and spiders. Your first-level headers should usually be your post titles and it’s best to not have a lot of sub-headers being listed that are just category names or other extraneous content.

The image list summary will show you the url and alt text for the images on your home page. This was good for me to see since I didn’t realize that my images did not have an ALT tag in them. That’s good to have for the Google Image search bot.

After that, the tool gives a summary of inbound links from Google and Yahoo and gives the current rank of the site for Technorati and Alexa. It also tells you how many pages showed up in Digg and del.icio.ous. Overall, not the best tool out there probably, but a decent one that I’m sure will get better! If you know of some more tools like this, please post a comment!

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One Response to “Website Grader - A free search engine optimization (SEO)/marketing tool”

7 free SEO tools to analyze and optimize your website for speed and compatibility Says:

[...] Grader - I wrote about Website Grader a few months back as a free search engine optimization tool that you should be using if you’re a webmaster. Website Grader will give you a report of many [...]
November 30th, 2007 at 2:41 pm