This week, I’d like to share a tip to help you improve your website’s page rank and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) success so your site can do better on Google and the other important search engines and directories.
HubSpot’s Website Grader (http://www.websitegrader.com) is a free seo tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of your website. It provides a score that incorporates a variety of parameters, such as website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.
Some of the factors that influence your website’s score are the basic but important SEO items on your homepage, such as page titles, meta tags, alt tags, headings and such. Website Grader will tell you what information is missing or incorrect so you can fix it, or tell your developer what needs to be done. For example, if your meta description is too long, you are advised to shorten it to the character length that Google likes best.
Next, it looks at a few interior pages of your site, to see if your meta tags and titles are unique for interior pages. The search engines appreciate individual meta tags for each page that reflect the content of that particular page.
Website Grader then looks at your domain name registration (did you know that the search engines prefer domains that are registered for more than a year at a time?), and checks to see what your Google Page Rank is, how many pages of your site are indexed, when the last craw was done, how many incoming links your site enjoys and your traffic ranking. It also lists whether your site is listed in important directories, such as Yahoo, ZoomInfo and Dmoz.
Next, Website Grader looks for a blog on your site, and searches for incoming links from the important social bookmarking sites, such as Digg and del.icio.us. It also checks to see if your site has a contact form, RSS feeds, and finally grades your keywords based on monthly search volumes.
Wow, that’s a lot of information to digest! I ran my own website through the grader and found several areas to fix. For example, the scorecard told me that my site needed a 301 permanent redirect so that Google will know that a link to www.theatriumdesign.com is the same as a link to the simplified theatriumdesign.com.
I’ll be going in to check my score again in a week or so, to see if my score has improved. Also, since the algorithms are constantly being updated, it makes sense to check back periodically to see how the SEO world is changing.
As always, the web moves quickly and keeping up with all the new ways to cross promote your business is important if you want to keep up with the times and stay ahead of your competition. So get out there and give your website a SEO tuneup!
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