A while ago I read a post about a guy receiving an unsolicited proposal from an SEO Company. So the dude takes the company’s web site, runs it through a web marketing analysis tool, and finds the web site lacking in terms of SEO. This was quite amusing. It may have been an amateur SEO Company. Or maybe they just did not care how their web site ranked. I assume it was the former case. Regardless I thought that I myself should see how my web sites fared with this tool.The tool is from the HubSpot site. It is an online tool where you feed it the URL of your site. The tool then analyzes your site in terms of SEO, and gives you a score from 1 to 100. The higher the score, the better your SEO techniques on the site. Now I will confess that I have ran many of my web sites through this tool. Most of my sites do not fare greatly. Then again, I have not diligently followed the best practices for SEO on them. I though I would review the results I got back from analyzing my premier site which is Software Maintenance.
The HubSpot tool was quick to point out a lot of SEO problems with my site. I had no meta description or keywords on my pages. I also was missing alt text for images (and I have a ton of images on the site). There were no keywords on the inner pages of the web site. The site was hosted on a free domain (Blogger). There were no links to my site from delicious or Digg. And there was no way to sign up for updates on the site. Ouch. It sounded like my site got spanked,.
The good news is that the tool did report some positive SEO things about my site. For instance the domain was registered for more than one year. Thanks Google. It also had an entry on DMOZ and Yahoo directory. Those were added manually by me. The tool stated that my site had a blog. Well in fact my site is a blog. The tool also detected that my site has an RSS feed.
The tool graded my site below 50%. Last time I was in school, 50% translated into failure. That might be wake up call to do a little SEO work on the site. However what matters are hard results. Some of the items listed may be subjective or have little to do with my site’s success. Here are the statistics that the tool determined for my site. It has an Alexa ranking of about 8 million, which puts it in the top 29%. Yeah that is not too good. The tools also found that my site had a Technorati ranking of around 900,00, which puts it in the top 1.39%. Nice. The worst news was that my site did not have a Google page rank yet. I am hoping this is due to the fact that the site is new. We shall see.
