While grading tools are often looked at as simply a way to measure your ego, they can be a valuable addition to your SEO toolbox when employed properly.
Grading tools are a great way to get a quick snapshot of a website without having to do any in-depth analysis yourself. I sometimes employ the use of these tools when evaluating potential link prospects, prospective clients, and for general curiosity purposes. While I tend to use my terminal command line prompt more than any one of these tools, they are definitely a resource I keep in my back pocket, and so should you.
Domain Tools
First up, and probably my personal favorite is Domain Tools. Domain Tools comes in especially handy when evaluating link prospects because it gives you information such as: registrar history, reverse ip, ip history, and nameserver history. In addition to these handy tools, it gives a site profile view that shows everything from number of links internal and external on the page, to listings in DMOZ and Yahoo!, along with general traffic information including alexa and compete ranks.
Trifecta
The Trifecta tool from SEOmoz gives a clean breakdown of metrics including: pagerank, google url mentions, Y! SE links, and ranking for the first 4 words in your title, along with an overall “score”. While the information provided here is somewhat basic, it can be useful especially when the tool is used in comparison for multiple sites. This will give you a more accurate picture of the strength of different sites in their relation to each other, which is typically how I tend to use this type of tool.
Website Grader
The Website Grader from Hubspot gives a detailed breakdown of both on-page and off-page elements. On-page the grader looks at: title tags, meta data, headers, images, and even rates the readability of your content. One thing I like specifically about this tool is that you can simply scroll through, and elements that they find missing or have determined to be unsatisfactory, are highlighted in red so they are easy to spot. This is a good way to digest what areas on the analyzed site need attention. Off-page the grader analyzes: domain history, pagerank, index number, last crawl, traffic (according to alexa), inbound links, DMOZ and Yahoo! listings.
In addition to these on and off page elements, there are additional blog, social media, conversion, and competitive analysis available as well. However these additional analyses seem somewhat basic and not as useful.
Did we forget something?
Let us know in the comments which tools are your favorites so we can be sure to check them out!
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Nice work on both this post and the link analysis post. I’m looking forward to reading more of your reviews as the site grows.
One very useful tool that I recently came across is http://www.spydermate.com which gives you a really useful breakdown of your important page elements like Titles, Descriptions and H1 tags, as well as a load of other metrics (Alexa and Compete ranks etc) and a broken link checker (although this part doesn’t seem to be quite as thorough as Xenu Link Slueth, which I’m sure you’ll be writing about in due course). Definitely a very useful tool for analysing a site in a hurry. You’re limited to just 25 pages if you aren’t registered but can go up to 500 once you have created an account, which is still completely free. One of the best new SEO tools I’ve found (and no I haven’t been paid to say any of this, I’m just really impressed with the tool).
Keep up the good work,
KJ
Awesome, I will make sure to check it out! Thanks!