Meta Tags

These are your title, description and keyword fields. Using your selected keywords these fields should be completed for every page on your site. This is basic SEO, is easily performed, yet seldom done. Low hanging fruit here!

Domain Information

Search engines like to see stability from your domain name. Some sites score well, but have lousy SEO otherwise because they have an old domain name. Consider registering your domain name for two or more years at a time. That helps and is cheap.

Google Statistics

When was the last time your site was crawled? The more often the better. Frequent crawling helps your ranking and means you have new content. Stop adding content and they come back less frequently and you slide down the charts.

Google Page Rank

Page Rank (PR) is a measure of your popularity among other sites. While your PR as a stand alone value does not matter all that much, comparing it to your competition is important. You definitely want to out rank them. As a general guide here is how you can consider PR.

• 0: Google doesn’t think the site is very important. It doesn’t get much traffic or doesn’t have much useful information on it.
• 1-2: Google has noticed this web site and thinks it is worthy of some recognition
• 3-4: Google gives this web site a fair amount of authority and sees it as a decent source of information
• 5-6: This site is a very established source of quality information
• 7-8: Google says this site is a major player
• 9-10: These rankings are reserved for the big dogs

Alexa Traffic Rank

This is a measure of traffic starting with number one, Google and measuring up to 25 million. Of course there are far more sites than this but they stop at 25 million. Again, don’t take this rating to the bank; it is a good barometer and a useful comparison. To know where your site fits in look on the chart.

· 1,000,000 and higher — You’re basically invisible

· 500,000-1,000,000 — On the radar

· 100,000-500,000 — Not a major player, but worth some recognition

· 10,000-100,000 — Getting some really good traffic…watch these sites

· 1,000-10,000 — These guys are the professionals

· < 1,000 — Don’t try beating them…see if you can join them

Inbound Links

Also called backlinks, these are a key measure of success. In fact the entire site can be terrible SEO wise, but with enough backlinks it will rank well. Backlinks show that other sites find yours interesting. Obtaining quality backlinks is the difficult part of SEO, the processes above are easily done by most anyone after you have done the keyword research.

Getting backlinks is time consuming and involves a lot of research and in many cases using software tools or a contractor. Be cautious when using a contractor, you want your backlinks to be appropriate. If you are a building contractor you don’t want your link on a Viagra site (don’t laugh, you’ll get offers for links like that). Normally you’ll be asked to have a link to the other site on your site. As long as it’s compatible then do so. If you can manage a few hundred backlinks you will have done a good job.

False Readings

There are a few warnings when reading the results of Website Grader. Well done sites that are fairly new need some time to be indexed and get some traffic. If you see the basic SEO work done right but the site is fairly new it might have a lower score. Conversely a site with relatively poor SEO work, but with a long history might be rated higher than it ought to be.

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