On Blogging and Social Media

Getting really useful feedback on your site or blog can be difficult and expensive, but there are some free tools which can help you to find out what you are doing right or wrong and help you to make technical improvements that may well boost your search engine optimisation (SEO) and so the visibility of your site to new visitors.

One tool that I have just tried is Website Grader and I was quite impressed by the amount of detailed information I was able to get about my blog without even parting with my email address.

How to grade your website

• To get your website's grade and report just got to: Website Grader and enter the URL of your site or blog. If you want to benchmark your site against others that you consider to be similar or competitors you can also enter their URLs too and generate a single report.

• Then just click on 'Generate Report' and your report will be created along with a grade which you can display on your site if you wish.

How to get SEO advice

• The site doesn't just analyse the content of your site and how well the pages are constructed, it also searches through different search engines and social networking sites to see what kind of impact your site is making.
• After a couple of minutes you can read through the report and find out where you are doing well and where you could make improvements.
• Where improvements are needed you are supplied with an explanation and some details so you can easily start making changes that will benefit your site immediately.

• All the information given is explained and you can dig more deeply into any areas you are unsure of simply by clicking on some of the links provided.

How to learn more about SEO

Website Grader is a great way to learn a bit more about your site and about some of the tricky sides of SEO that can at times seem rather complex. I'm already working on a few things I learned about my sites and making some improvements. I think though at the end of the day it's important to remember that however much you work on your SEO, the best way to bring traffic to your site and keep people coming back is to write good content.

How about you?

• How do you evaluate your site?
• Have you used other SEO tools?
• Have you ever had any SEO help from marketing companies?
• Did Website Grader tell you anything new about your site?

Related links:

• Compare your site using benchmarking
• Google Webmaster Tools
• How to track your site

Another good reason for having a Google Account is that you can also get free access to Google's Webmaster Tools. These can give you valuable information about your site or blog and also help you to make sure that Google is indexing the pages from your site to their search engine.

You have to register each individual site or blog to use the tools on it, but this only takes a few minutes, so here's how it's done.

• Log in to your Gmail or Google Analytics account and go to your Google Account. This is where you can manage all your Google services from.
• Look for the link to 'Webmaster Tools'
  

• Once you click on the link you will go to the Webmaster Tools Dashboard and here you just click on 'Add a site' (as you can see below I already have three sites added).

• You them copy and paste in the URL of the site you would like to add then click on 'Continue'

• You will then see that your site has been added but that it is not verified. You must verify your site to prove that it belongs to you. To do this you copy the verification script that you are given.

• You go to the template of your blog or the html code of your website and add the script to your site. This is easy to do on Blogger by going to the 'Layout' then clicking on 'Edit HTML'.

• You then past the code into the head of your code. That's between the and tags.

• Once you have done this make sure you save your template and then return to you Webmaster Tools Account and click to verify your code. If you have added the code correctly you should get a congratulations message.

• It will take a while for Google to start populating your account with information about your site, so you should come back and look after more than 24 hours. If you want to be extra sure that Google is getting all your pages you can also add a link to an xml Sitemap by clicking the Sitemap link.

If you have an Atom feed for your site or blog you can add that and it will help Google to crawl through your pages.

Well I hope this helps you get information about your site and makes sure that Google lists your pages.

How about you?

• What ways do you use to improve your traffic from search engines?
• Which search engines are the most important for you?

Related links:

• How to track your site
• Compare your site using benchmarking

In an earlier post I looked at how to add Google Analytics tracking to your site so that you can start getting some information about how many people are visiting your site and what they are doing there.

Google Analytics gives you loads of information, which is great, but how can you tell if the your stats are good or bad? The answer to this is benchmarking.



If you add benchmarking to your stats profile you can compare your site to other sites of a similar size and within a similar market, find out how successful your site is and where you need to do more work.

How to add benchmarking

• To add bench marking you go to your account and click on 'Edit account settings'

• Then enable 'Share my Google Analytics data' and click 'Save Changes'. Al, your data will be anonymous, so you don't need to worry too much.

• Once you have done this go back to your dashboard click on 'Visitors' and then select 'Benchmarking'

• You can then see a range of different stats with your site compared to others of similar size.

• If you want to compare with sites that are in a similar field or industry, then click on 'Open category list' and select a category. Unfortunately there isn't an education section , but you could try comparing to various sciences.

• As I said this information can be really useful as it can show you where your site is strong and where you need to make improvements. Google analytics can give you an incredible range of detailed information, but don't get too worried about digging to deep. Just start by looking at where you are doing well (The green percentages tell you this)

• And where you could think about making improvements (The red percentage rates will show you this)

Well I hope this gives you some useful information and reassures you that your site is doing well.

How about you?

• How do you measure the success of your site?
• What tools do you use?
• Which areas do you think you need to improve?

Please feel free to leave a comment and share your experience.

Related links:

• How to track your site