We often get asked about the tools that we use when conducting a performance review of our clients websites. This blog post is a guide to some of the tools and terms that we use.
These tools analyse your SEO and marketing, allowing you to improve your search ranking and the effectiveness of your site. Therefore, helping you to drive more traffic to your site.
Website Grader
Website Grader is one of the most popular website graders, providing you with details of your sites traffic rank, backlinks, social media and charting of your sites performance over time. In addition, it analyses your on-site SEO, such as keyword and title optimisation. Total Inbound links are also factored into the score, these provide an indication that your website is trustworthy and contains good, relevant content. These are all aggregated to provide you with a score in comparison to other sites that the system has graded. As of 3rd December, our site is ranked with a score of 84, this means that we score higher than 84% of other websites.
Nibbler
A new grader which offers a simplified version of Silktides Sitebeam. This system tests your sites Accessibility, Experience, Marketing and Technology. Factors that are considered include W3C compliance, printability, link formatting and image format. In addition, it checks Facebook and Twitter to see how well marketed your site is on social networks. All of these factors make Nibbler one of the most inclusive ways of testing your SEO and Marketing.
Open Site Explorer
Open Site Explorer is one of the best ways to analyse who is linking to your site. This is important because Search Engines look at these to determine a sites Popularity and Authority. Having good links strengthens your sites authority, the better the quality of incoming links the higher your site will appear on a search engines results page (SERPs).
Google Analytics
This must be the webmasters favourite tool, it is rich with features and information as to the performance of a website. Its key features include how many people have viewed your site, allowing you to analyse traffic sources, demographic, keywords and content. Recently they have added a real-time overview allowing you to see who is online at that moment in time. In the above example, you can see a spike in traffic that was caused by a direct marketing campaign through facebook and email newsletters.
Google Webmaster Tools
Another fantastic offering from Google, allowing you to review where specific pages / keywords appear within SERPs. You may often hear us talking about Google Page Rank, this is probably one of the most important parts of Google's Algorithm to determine your sites authority. Unlike other sites, webmaster tools provides full details of linking domains for all pages rather than just to the home page.