Buzz: Website Grader – Grade your website and evaluate your SEO!

Website Grader blends over 50 different variables, including search engine data, website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others, to evaluate the quality of a website, provide comparable data for other sites, and tips on how to improve yours.

websitegrader

I was intrigued so I decided to run a number of websites through the grading and came up with some interesting stuff.

johnchow grades

This report for JohnChow Dot Com graded his site at 99.6%. While this doesn’t really surprise me, for sites that score lower grades, a comparison can be quite instructive. So I ran my own blog through this site.

investorblogger grades

So the grade is a little lower, probably because of the fewer Diggs, fewer Bloglines accounts, and the fewer De.licio.us bookmarks. They do provide a download ebook so that you can pick up a few tips, I’m just reading it now.

It’s always fun to rate your site and see how it measures, but really the whole blog thing is simply about how much traffic you get anyway. So don’t let this be another Blogging Dead End.

Hack Sitesell Sites: Five Tips on How to Gain a Competitive Insight on any SBI Website.

Until now, I’ve kept these tips & tricks under my hat, because they weren’t widely known. It’s easy to get an insight into a popular Sitesell website with these simple tips, and what’s best is that the information is all public!

How to Discover Almost Any SBI-site’s Secrets, otherwise known as how to hack a Sitesell site (not that anyone cares anymore!). I’ll assume that you have a website set up (any one), and that you have your eyes on a keyword or niche already. If not, then perhaps you already know an SBI site… They’re easy to find, once you know what patterns to use.

1. Open the source code to find the keywords in the HTML. Look for the keyword in the index.html… or choose a keyword that you think should have SBI sites. Example: kids parties.

2. Join Sitesell’s own brandname Link Exchange Service, and when you register use the keywords. Gradually, over the next few weeks or months, you’ll find that your site is matched with many sites that have also registered, because of your choice of keyword.

Once you have enough data, look for sites that use /index.html as the main page (this is likely an SBI-site).

Visit the site and determine if it is. You may need no more than an overview of the first page… or you may need to do a WHOIS search (easy enough) to check if the DNS servers are linked to Sitesell.

3. Once you have determined your shortlist, visit each site. Then add the text ‘urllist.txt’ after the URL (thus, mysbisite.com/urllist.txt). This will output a fairly complete list of ALL the pages on that site. Since each url includes the filename.html, you will have a complete list of the primary keywords that builds each site.

Copy the entire list into a text writer (like Notepad+), then using copy+replace remove the code from each URL, thus: *http://www.mysbisite.com/*.html

and finally copy and replace each ‘-’ with a space.

Admittedly, if you have filenames that are long… these may or may not include keywords that are relevant. However, most keywords used as filenames are three words or shorter.

So, copy the list into Excel, and sort by number of words in each line. Voila! You now have your future competitor’s entire current keyword list, probably ending at three or four keyword length.

Repeat and rinse until you have a fairly complete overview of all your SBI’s competitors’ keywords, size of their sites, etc. (You can also do this with their sitemaps).

4. No longer want to work on the web or need deeper analysis? You can simply ‘rip’ their SBI site to your own hard-drive using HTTrack, giving you the opportunity to study the site in more depth.

While you cannot reuse their words, data, etc … and you wouldn’t want to be sued… you can spend a lot of time studying the successful sites’ structure (T2-T3 via the right menu… you can determine the T2s straight away), page design, content, … etc.

It’s all their for you to see, right in front of your eyes. And with gently more sophisticated tools, by searching for the ‘Return to xxx’ in the data, you can determine the list of T3s for each page fairly quickly, too.

5. There are so many services now out there that can help you determine a site rankings, traffic, etc… just plug the URL directly into your favorite tools, you’ll find a lot more intelligence on those sites, including recent performance, rankings, social standing, etc. By plugging the keywords into your favorite keyword tools, you will also find out what keywords are profitable and what are not.

So, I’m saying these things because they can be done, are technically not difficult to do, and unfortunately enabled (indirectly) by SBI’s poor over all design. By outing the best performing sites, SBI just makes the list of competitors ever longer, violates the entrepreneur’s trust, and creates a dog-eat-dog environment of exploitative confrontation, not cooperation.

Hack Sitesell Sites to get the Skinny

That’s the skinny on your SBI competitor site. All from publicly available information, nothing hacked at all. All right in front of your eyes. And I actually fail to see how this is ‘black hat’! All of the information is published and accessible via your own Browser!

Why are you building someone else’s Web 2.0 wealth?

There are many community based sites on the Web2.0… and many of them are private companies, not foundations. While many of them claim to have altruistic motives, sometimes the motivation of money can be much stronger than the notion of building a unique service that helps humanity.

For most users, that’s fine because they don’t really worry about such things. But if you are a webmaster and you’re busy using these websites (e.g. Facebook) to build your brand, draw traffic to your site, or sell products, I have but one question to ask:

Why are you making someone else rich when you should be tilling your own Web 2.0 fields?

This is seriously an issue. It didn’t just affect your social life, it will also impact your business development. I’ll give you three reasons:

1. It’s their field, not yours

Simply put, you are building someone else’s business by submitting content, viewing content, and developing relationships THERE. It’s not building your own brand, business or blog HERE. Facebook’s stock valuation is rising, how is yours doing?

Well, if you put all your time & effort into your Facebook profile, and neglect your own field… there’s not going to be much to harvest come summertime, is there?

Solution: Till your fields, drive traffic from the Web 2.0 to your site, put most of your effort onto your site. Avoid distractions.

2. It’s their game, not yours

Things change, something we all realize. Since the internet first came about, the only constant has been the nature & speed of change. We intrinsically know this. But even within Social Media, things change fast.

Even a simple change in TOS can effectively mean that your business is no longer possible (either outlawed by TOS or made prohibitively expensive). While these kinds of changes aren’t that common, you can just ask those users of services like YouTube, Ebay, AdSense, etc. that have had accounts closed because of changes of TOS, or been forced to close accounts because they can’t continue under the new TOS.

Where service continuity and TOS aren’t issues, you will find that algorithm changes can severely impact your social network performance. Take a look at the feed of your Facebook profile, now compare that to the most recent feed. The same? Hardly. Facebook’s algos regularly pull content from your feed that IT thinks you don’t want to see.

As a user, I find this very regretful. I followed many websites on Facebook because I wanted to stay current with their updates, such as OMGUbuntu, or Agnes b coffee shop, but I rarely see posts from either in my feed. With less viewership, there is less incentive for these websites to post anything new on their Facebook profiles.

No one expects Facebook to be primarily for brands or products, but … we do like to keep up with our favorites, don’t we? Agnes b. for example has over 120k likes… yet on one of its posts, there were 331 likes and 2 comments! I won’t tell how small the % of the interactions is… it’s ludicrously small.

Solution: Look for value on the Social Networks. Sometimes paying to play will provide the answer to your issues (because they need to earn money and discern quality feeds). Consider…

3. Pay to Play

Facebook want you to pay for that access; and you can advertise on their system. For many websites, this is a viable way to go and traffic can be quite good for a reasonable price. I would only suggest you do this to drive traffic to your site.

Obviously, Facebook wants you to drive traffic to your presence on THEIR network. You could do this, too; but I think you will find that there is little point to doing so. One of the ways of doing is to “Boost Your Post” which is activated on selected posts (again, you can’t always choose which post to boost). Check out this post from The Digital Marketer on “The $5 Solution to Your Organic Reach Problem on Facebook” on performance and read the comments. Obviously, there are as many caveats: watch your performance, track your budget, watch for algo changes.

4. Service Outages

First there was Myspace and Friendster. Who uses those nowadays? Now we have Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn. But how long those will be here? Already many apps are forging communities based solely around the phone; it’s already the next big social network.

Now look at the gyrations that happened to Myspace over the years, and consider what happened to Geocities and Friendster? Neither of these sites is now operational. Yahoo! closed Geocities down recently, too.

And Yahoo has a habit of purging sites, services and companies that they do not feel have a future. So, although I use Flickr, I don’t depend on Flickr being available for ever. But I wonder how many people upload their photos to Flickr as their only copy! Stupid, yes. Do people do it? Yes.

But this threat can cut into your business, even when the site doesn’t disappear.  Twitter, FaceBook, YouTube are all evolving media and while at least one of the three is supported by big pockets, you can bet bottom dollar that ALL of these services will depend on being successful on their monetization models.

However, even success there doesn’t guarantee that the business won’t be closed down, limited, restricted, or made premium, by current or new owners at some point in the future.

So, if you value something, always have at least two copies of something: one on your PC, and one on a preserved copy. Just in case you have to deal with a closure.

Now, have I convinced you to start planting your own fields? I hope so. Have you started yet?