This is a really useful reference table showing you how your site is performing compared to your top 5 selected competitors. It contains a number of different factors that are part of our fundamental SEO checks. The information changes on a daily basis as our software tools find more information about your site and its competitors. It is very useful as another benchmark at the start of your SEO campaign. So do come back regularly to check how your SEO efforts are paying off.
We report on the number of links from other websites to your website compared to your competition. As you are probably well aware, good quality links with relevant (anchor) text from quality websites will help your ranking efforts.
We now use Majestic SEO (the world's largest independent database of links) to find the backlinks to your site. The backlink counts are updated daily and we pull in the top 5,000 backlinks by default for you and up to 5 competitors to help you analyse your link building efforts (see Off-Site tab). You can increase or decrease the number of backlinks you want to analyse in depth by changing the limits per sites from your Settings > Usage tab. Please bear in mind that increasing the limits may incur overage charges (you are not charged for the competitors links, e.g. increasing the number of backlinks from 5,000 to 15,000 will give you an additional 10,000 backlinks to explore for your site and all your competitors, but you will only be charged (if applicable) for the additional 10,000).
We also now track the top unique referring domains from Majestic SEO. This is a leading ranking indicator and benchmarking where you are against your competitors and how this changes over time is a good indicator of whether your SEO efforts are helping you stay ahead of the competition.
We now also show you the number of unique IPs linking to your website.
Google and other search engines may down-weight too many links from the same IP, as it can imply common ownership of websites, we therefore also show you the number of unique C-class IPs linking to your website.
The deep link ratio is the ratio of deep-links to website root links. The more high quality backlinks from relevant sites, the higher your site will rank. Backlinks to your interior pages (deep links) are more valuable for SEO as they are more likely to point to content web searchers are looking for.
The more links pointing to your interior pages, the higher your SEO Deep Link Ratio. This is simply the number of deep links divided by the total number backlinks.
There are lots of articles written about the importance and relevance, or not, of Google's PageRank algorithm.
We're not going to repeat all that here; suffice to say it goes on a sliding scale from 0 (new site) to 10 (Global Supersite) and just because your page rank goes up or down from time to time does not mean that you will see a corresponding increase or decrease in your search engine rankings or site visitors.
It is really only useful as a general indication about the quality of a site; and we use it when looking for potential partners online to prioritise our workloads. Don’t get too worried about it; sites with lower PageRanks often rank higher for certain keywords than sites with higher PageRanks.
All this being said and done, we'd rather have a GPR of 10 than 3; who wouldn't?
Alexa is a useful tool used to rank web site traffic and it can provide a useful rule of thumb guide to how your website stacks up against all your competitors. The lower the Alexa ranking number the greater the number of visitors a site has. These rankings are sometimes (but not always) consistent with the order, amount of traffic and range of sites. Do bear in mind, that whilst there are a few million users being tracked by the Alexa toolbar, they are not that representative of the Internet at large, and are heavily skewed to the US. For this reason, we just use this as a rule of thumb measure and probably wouldn't have included it but for the fact that several Webmasters and SEOs we know keep asking us to keep it in!
We compare how many pages each of your competitors has listed in the major search engines with the number of pages found by Majestic SEO's spider when it crawled your site as it tries to crawl your site in a manner that broadly reflects the behaviour of a search engine robot.
Mimicking a search engine crawler is important for a number of important reasons; we use our own proprietary spider to identify areas where technical problems with your site may be causing problems for search engine robots to index your content properly; to get a list of all your site pages and to capture content from your site including on-page copy and headings, meta tags, image information and more.
We'll use all this data later to try and give you some pointers about what you could do to improve the quality of your site for users and search engines. Both of which will have a positive impact on your online business!
If we find your site has say 50 pages and there are only 10 in each search engine then it is likely that your site is either new or something is preventing the search engines from indexing it properly.
There are a lot of reasons why search engines may not index all your pages; such as the age of your domain, your 'trust', the volume of pages and rate of changes. So do not worry if you have most of your content indexed but not all of it - this is very common.
You should worry if you are not indexed at all and have been around for a while! Especially if you do not rank for your brand name.
If you are not indexed and you have not submitted your site to the search engines before then do this now!
The potential reasons why your site may not be listed are many, but it could be issues such as your site is developed in Flash and has no html content; or your meta tags or robots.txt files are blocking spiders from accessing your content. Perhaps users have to pay to register to access certain parts of your site and a well meaning technical guy has blocked all your juicy content from being indexed.
Whatever the reason may be, there is always a solution. So show this data to your web developer or give him access to it online. Or get some professional help.
If we find your site has say 50 pages but there are over 50 pages listed in each search engine then you have a different problem. It is highly likely that you have duplicate content on your site.
Again there could be many reasons why this is the case; common problems are with Content Management Systems that spit out long complicated URLs that are hard to index or shopping carts that have a multi faceted navigation for selecting the same product in different colours and sizes.
You do not want the search engines indexing all this content as they have a hard time deciding which is the most relevant page for a particular query and waste resources indexing pages they need not. This will limit the amount of time ("crawl equity") they have to visit and index your site; and usually results in poor indexing of your content.
Clearly to be successful online you want to create the best possible user experience. One key factor is how long your home page takes to download. For this reason we compare your server response time against your competitors.
People do not want to hang around and there's billions of alternative websites out there for them; so do not give them an excuse to leave before they have even got to your content.
Ask your developer to streamline your home page as much as possible by reducing and optimising images, removing redundant code and looking at your hosting infrastructure and server load as your visitors and usage grow.
If it takes more than 5 seconds to download your home page - then think again about the design of your home page.
We monitor this for you on a daily basis - and can alert you if the performance worsens or is slower than a target you set. Check your notifications in Settings.
YSlow analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages. YSlow is a Firefox add-on and you can download it here or you can also use Google’s Page Speed plug-in.
An HTML sitemap is simply a list of pages on your site, usually nicely ordered and sometimes with useful descriptions.
It is useful for users to help them find exactly what they are looking for as well as for search engines who can follow all these links. Your site really should have one. It is normally on its own page called /sitemap.html, or sitemap.aspx or similar, but it could be called something else!
If we couldn't find your HTML sitemap automatically it does not necessarily mean you do not have one; it may be because your developers have called it a funny name, given it a funny file extension or not put it in an obvious place.
We automatically check all the usual names, file extensions and standard locations for this file; so if it is not there and you definitely have one then please contact us and let us know what your file is called.
If you are not sure then ask your website developer whether he has created one, if so what is it called and if not why not! Then ask him to create one for you. It is not a big job and he should not charge you a lot unless you have a huge site.
You can break up sitemaps into different segments for different parts of your site and we currently recommend no more than 10,000 pages per sitemap. Need some professional SEO help.
There are web standards that the search engines expect your XML sitemap to be in and you can find them here http://www.sitemaps.org/.
The beauty of a properly configured XML sitemap is that it automatically tells the search engines that your site has changed and gives them a complete list of pages. Whilst it won't change your search engine rankings overnight it may go someway to helping ensure your site is properly indexed.
It is also worthwhile submitting your initial sitemap once created to the search engines directly in their Webmaster Tools accounts of by pinging them with your feed.
If you are not indexed and you have not submitted your site to the search engines before then do this now by clicking on the relevant task in the ‘Things To Do’ Workload.
For detailed instructions on how to ping your XML sitemap feed click here.
We check for your XML sitemap as part of our daily healthcheck and we will automatically flag the Create XML Sitemap task as complete in the Workload once your developer has put one on your site.
This alerts you if your site has no robots.txt file or it is incorrectly configured. A properly configured file can help you direct search engines that obey the Robots Exclusion Protocol to the important parts of your site and can stop them indexing content that you do not want indexed.
We check for your robots.txt file as part of our daily healthcheck and we will automatically flag the Create Robots.txt task as complete in the Workload once your developer has put one on your site.
It is not a big job and should take any decent developer less than half an hour to write this for you - unless you have a huge site!
You will find further advice and information about robots.txt files here.
Conventionally, most servers are configured to tell a user or a search engine when a page is not found (with a 404 error). If you adopt this approach you can then customise the error page with any or all of the following: your own friendly comment, a link to your home page, other related links, a search form and a site map to help the user or search engine continue their search.
It is important to check this works properly for a number of reasons the most important of which is the user experience but it is also helpful for search engine bots as you stop them from getting to a dead end.
To test whether your site has a Custom 404 error page and what happens when someone incorrectly types in a URL or is led to an old deleted or moved page then simply type some gobbledegook after your domain in your internet browser and see what you get. e.g. www.example.com/fdsgfjewkgkl.
If you get a nicely formatted page with some helpful links to the home page, sitemap or key pages then you are fine; but if you get an Internet Explorer error page or similar then you really should ask your website developers to change this for you.
If you get redirected to your home page this is not necessarily a good thing as depending upon how this page redirect is configured you (e.g. With a 200 Status OK message) could be giving misleading information to search engines and we have seen this cause significant duplicate content issues.
Your web developer should always redirect obsolete pages on a one to one basis if possible to the most relevant new page with a 301 permanent redirect; this ensures any user who has bookmarked an old page will find a new one, and that search engines will pass the link value of the old page to the new page so you do not hurt your search engine rankings or authority.
We check for your Custom 404 page as part of our daily healthcheck and we will automatically flag the Create Custom 404 page task as complete in the Workload once your developer has put one on your site.
The age of your domain may have some influence on your ranking. There is some debate about this amongst SEOs and rather than reiterate that here; why not check-out Ann Smarty’s excellent summary here.
We compare your site with all of your competitors across a range of important factors.(If you have no competitors you can add them from Step 2 of the Site Config Wizard available from the Quicklinks menu). We then score points depending upon how you perform vis-à-vis your competition for each factor. Some elements are weighted more highly than others in our scoring system.
The main thing to focus on here is have you got ‘ticks’ in all the right boxes; and can you try and outperform your competitors across the board on the majority of elements. If you can, then over time you should see your search engine rankings and website traffic increase.
We've explained the importance of each factor we check and why it's worth monitoring below. If you need further information or clarification about any aspect of the Analytics SEO tool then please post a question in our SEO Blog.