So I very often us a tool called SEO Quake to investigate the potential that a website has to rank in Google. There are a few things that I like to look at and I’ll get into detail on them and show you how you can perform the same type of analysis on your website.

SO let’s start at square one. This free tool is called SEO Quake and it’s available at seoquake.com as a plug-in for both Firefox and Google Chrome. Its main purpose is to make it easy to see the SEO stats of any particular page on the internet. Interpreting those stats is another story and I’ll get into that in today’s video. By the end of this video, you should feel empowered to quickly analyze the SEO health of your website or of a competitor. It’ll make goal-setting that much easier for your SEO program. Let’s get started.

For my SEOQuake preferences, I enable the SEOtoolbar, which means that I’ll get my page stats loaded within the top toolbar of my internet browser. In that browser, I make sure that I have 5 key parameters enabled as well: Google PageRank, Google Index, Yahoo links, Yahoo Linkdomain and Webarchive Age. The last key parameter that I focus on is there by default: Internal Links.

So what do these parameters tell me? Well, I analyze the homepage first and here’s what I get from SEOQuake. We’ll discuss what you should be reading into these numbers in the next slide.

1. Google PageRank tells me how visible the homepage is to Google’s robots in general. High PageRanks indicate a higher probability that the next page that Google sees on the internet is this page. It is influenced by the combined PageRank passed along from inbound links – so yes, both quantity and quality of inbound links have different impacts to this number.
2. Google Index is a quick number of how many pages Google has been able to find and keep in their index from your site.
3. Yahoo Links and Yahoo LinkDomain are two different figures worth looking at. Yahoo Link for the homepage tells you how many links point to your homepage. LinkDomain tells you how many links point to your entire site. The difference between the two gives us a powerful number: how many links point to interior pages of your website.
4. Webarchive Age give you a date – simple. It’s the date that your page was first indexed by arhive.org. Essentially, it’s a very good record of how old your site is in SEO terms.
5. Internal links is a default setting and it tells you how many pages the current page (ie. homepage) is linking to within this domain.

Great – now we know what stats are important and what they means – but what can you conclude from these numbers?

The read-ins are critical. When analyzing a website, you first need to answer ‘how strong is the website?’ before you start determining what keywords to go after and what traffic goals you’ll get for yourself. These stats give you just that, in a very simple form. They answer two questions: How strong is the peak of the site? And, how deep is the site from an SEO perspective.

Let’s dig deeper. The Google PageRank tells us how visible a homepage is to Google, and its supported by the Yahoo link number. The higher the PageRank, the more competitive terms you can go after for your homepage and the top level pages of your website. Webarchive Age is an immutable, uncontrollable factor, but one that supports you over time: the longer your website has been around, the more strength your homepage has in the search engines.

So now you know how competitive of terms you can try targeting in the short run, the other stats help us identify how deep into the site you can set target goals for keyword ranking. Google Index gives us a descent indication of how much strength the rest of the site has and how deep it goes. The interior pages are helped by a strong balance of internal links from the homepage as well as deep in-bound links calculated through Yahoo LinkDomain.

The subtleties of this analysis comes in the more subjective questions:

1. Is my PageRank good enough for my industry?
2. Are my inbound links strong and are they helping me rank?
3. Am I utilizing internal links in a balanced way or am I either diluting or under-utilizing my strength?
4. How much of my site is in the index and does that make me competitive in my space?

These questions are not answered by SEOQuake and shouldn’t be answered in a vacuum. Here’s what you can do if you want more answers…

Exclusive Concepts offers free SEO audits to qualified websites where we answer these questions with you and help you identify the next steps you’ll need to take in order to become the leader in your space. Give us a call at 800-504-4324 for more information or visit our website at exclusiveconcepts.com.

Thank you and have a wonderful SEO Monday.