It’s called Sitebeam, and I’ve been using the original version as well as beta testing their new version that’s going to be released sometime very soon. Both rock. The new version is definitely better than the current version, but since the current version is the one that initially impressed the heck out of me, that says a lot about how great both are.

Ok, so I’ve been using this tool to improve one of my sites. I’ve run the tool, made note of things it finds problematic, fixed those things, rerun the tool, etc. – several times over the course of the last few weeks, until I’ve gotten my site in excellent shape. I still need to work on some external factors (backlinks and social shares), but I’ve pretty much nailed the onsite factors.

Without this tool, I’d never have noticed so many things that needed fixing. I’d already been spending a ton of time making that site better, so I thought I’d covered everything really well. Then I ran this tool on the site for the first time, and thought to myself, “Oh how did I miss that? And that? And that!!!”

So, enough of the backstory, let me show you some screenshots. I’ve blurred out some text to avoid giving out too much information about the site I’ve run this on, for competitive reasons.

Let’s start with the screen that shows up immediately after running a test. This amazing summary screen is shown, with links to all the details to the left.

Here’s a look at one of the summary sections, in this case, the marketing summary for my site.

This shows some details about the social interest (or lack thereof) of my site. Yes, I really need to work on this still.

I love the fact that I can compare my site with my competitors. This helps me see what areas I’ve fallen behind in (only trailing my competitor in marketing, in this example).

In the blink of an eye, the tool can create an entire powerpoint type presentation from the test results. If you are looking to get new clients, this is a great way to pitch them. Just show them a presentation that lets them know exactly how much work their site needs, all in beautifully laid out graphics that you didn’t have to create yourself! Have you ever tried to put a powerpoint presentation together? It’s a huge pain in the caboose, if ya know what I mean. To have a tool automagically create this for you is unreal, and highly exciting.

I could wow you with another 20 or so screenshots, but that wouldn’t be nearly as effective as having you see it for yourself by testing your own site, so go do that now, if you want.

The tool is a little pricey for the average solo site owner, though it won’t break the bank, but you can run the test for free to try it out, so I highly recommend you do so. And if you do any design or seo client work, this tool is well worth the cost! You can use the tool to woo clients, by showing them what could be improved, and you can prove your worth afterwards by showing new reports with improved scores.

Is the tool 100% perfect? Nope, probably not. I’d say I probably slightly disagreed with it on a couple of issues, but that’s not unusual. Get any two people in a room and ask them to grade a website. Think they’ll agree 100% on everything? Not likely, so I’m not surprised that I didn’t agree completely with a tool. Nevertheless, my differences with the analysis were pretty minor, so it didn’t diminish the value of the information I got from it at all, in my opinion.

I’m really excited that I found this tool, so let me stress again – go run your site through the free test. You’ll be happy I pushed you to do it!

Still not convinced? Really? Ok, check this out then. Here’s a full list of tests that are run:

• Alt text
• Amount of content
• Analytics
• Broken links
• Contact details
• Content keywords
• Design variations
• Error pages
• Facebook
• Flash
• Freshness
• Headings
• Image usage
• Incoming links
• Internal links
• Internal search
• Languages
• Links
• Link states
• Metadata
• Outgoing links
• Popularity
• Printability
• Readability
• Redirections
• Search engine results
• Search ranking
• Site structure
• Social interest
• Speed
• Spelling
• Spiderability
• Stylesheets
• Twitter
• Typosquatting
• URL chopping
• URL format
• Visual interest
• W3C compliance

The new version lets you create various types of reports, including a Comprehensive report like the one I showed above, a Sales report, which is a complete report but with less detail (perfect for sales pitches), a Staging report to test a site before it goes live (ignores tests for backlinks, social media etc. since the site isn’t live yet), a Marketing report to assess SEO and social media, a Social Media report, a Writing report, a Technical report, a Privacy report, and even a custom report that lets you mix and match any of the tests into one report.

What are you still doing here? Go run a test on your site using the current version, and then get more info about the new version being released soon.. Go!

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2011. | Permalink | 10 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: SEO, Usability, website grader tools
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.

Here’s a screenshot of just one small part of the report. You can see that each item is linked, which leads to all the item’s details. Honestly, a picture is worth a thousand words, so I don’t think I need to make this a long blog post. If the information you see below looks like the kind of information you’d want to monitor on your site, go sign up. It’s free for 1 site, limited to checking 500 pages on the site. That’s the option I am using for this site’s report. Looks like I have a lot of broken links to clean up, doesn’t it?

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2011. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: broken links, SEO, site monitoring
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.

SEO 101

The 5 Goals Of A Search Optimized Page – SEO 101

The most common question I see on SEO forums, primarily from SEO newbies, is something along the lines of “How do I get my site to rank well?” You have 5 goals when optimizing any of your site’s web pages. Your goals are to: Help search engines find the page, index the page, understand the page, evaluate the page and rank the page. We cannot control the search engine algorithms, so we must do what we can to help those algorithms find, index, understand, and evaluate our pages. If we do that well, we stand a much better chance of helping search engines properly rank our pages.

Long-Term Content

Create At Least One Resource Collection

Even one highly successful post can consistently bring you a substantial amount of traffic. The key is to make sure you have at least one of those, and the best way I’ve found is to work hard at creating at least one resource collection. What is a resource collection? It is a collection of “things”, related to your niche, that others want. For example, let’s say your niche is horses. Your visitors are horse-lovers. What collection of things would a horse lover be interested in? A series of high-quality pictures of horses? A collection of videos of a particular race horse? The “family trees” of each of the Kentucky Derby winners from the last 20 years?

Exposure Expenses

Thought Leader Thursday – Donna Fontenot, DazzlinDonna.com

Sometimes, spending money is the only way to get real quality, but it should be spent only when necessary. When you do throw cash around, try to only use it on a product or service that has been recommended by someone you trust. Finally, after you spend the money, check the return on your investment. If it was worth it, and can be repeated, do it again and again – as long as it remains profitable. If it was a waste, drop it quickly and don’t throw more money down the drain. Count that as a mistake and a lesson learned.

Influence Buzz

Exhale Creativity: Inhale Buzz

Two types of people will be involved in most creative buzz campaigns – the performers and the audience. In some cases, the performers are all bundled into one person (you). In most cases, the performers will be the buzz starters and influencers; usually bloggers. The audience consists of the people who will market your product or service for you by talking about it, sharing it, linking to it, and promoting it. Start with a focus on your audience. If you know who they are (as a group), you will find it easier to locate the performers and influencers that they connect with and listen to. Which bloggers have the most influence over your audience?

One note: Don’t concentrate solely on the top influencers. While it’s great to be able to snag a top blogger as a performer in your campaign, it can be difficult to compete for the attention of most of them. Any contact you have with them may go unnoticed. It’s often easier and more productive to recruit a larger number of second-tier influencers to participate in your buzz campaign than it is to attract the attention of the top-tier bloggers in your niche.

>> Follow Donna Fontenot

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Buzz, expenses, resources, SEO
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.

UPDATE: I’ll try to update this post occasionally as time goes by.

Be The Go-To Blogger for Topical Event Curation

Your blog can become the “go-to guide” for event news curation in your niche. When an event occurs, you can be the one to build a collection of content that is worth a reader’s time. Here are a few tips on becoming a great event curator.

SEO Dojo Radio – the totally Dazzlin edition!

In the second half hour of this SEO Dojo Radio Podcast, I talk shop with David Harry and Terry Van Horne about SEO, making money online, marketing, and various things as we hold an informal industry discussion.

Discover What Google Really Thinks Of Your Pages

What does Google REALLY think of your site’s pages? Determine the rate of importance that Google places upon each of your pages, not by PageRank, but by analyzing crawl rate. Grab a free tool that tracks Googlebot and learn how to massage the data so that you can focus attention on those pages that you think are important, but Google apparently doesn’t.

Exhale Creativity: Inhale Buzz

Sometimes you jut get lucky and buzz spreads about your company, product, or service seemingly out of thin air. While it’s truly exciting when that happens, I wouldn’t sit around waiting for it. Sometimes you have to make your own luck. Buzz usually requires an excellent product or service that just knocks the socks right off everyone. If yours can generate that WOW factor simply because it is so great and solves a problem that everyone has, then you’re definitely ahead of the game. However, even WOW products can be overlooked in the daily stream of our lives. That’s when you need to help get the buzz started, and creativity is the best way to make that happen.

Streamline Your Content Creation Process With Time-Saving Systems

I run sites that are mostly informational in nature, and since informational sites need lots of actual … well … information, that means I spend a good deal of my time creating content. Creating good content takes time, and like most of you, I have very little time, so over the years I’ve created a “system” that helps me shave off as much wasted time as possible during the process. Here’s a glimpse at the content creation system that works for me. Feel free to use any parts of my system to streamline your own content creation process.

Intelligently Crafting Content

I could start off this article by saying that to succeed with SEO, you should create high-quality content, but if I did that, you would immediately think, “same old ‘content is king’ blah, blah, blah”, and you’d probably not read any further. So instead, let’s just start off by stipulating that creating great content is a given. So often, however, no one really goes beyond the phrase “good content” to discuss how to create that content, and just as importantly, how to plan it out, and effectively create a flow throughout the site.

Analyzing Your Text Content from a Graphic Point of View

“You can’t see the forest for the trees” is an old saying that holds much truth when we are trying to analyze our own content. You’ve looked at your own content so much you probably no longer see it the way your visitors do (or the way search engines will). Sometimes I find it useful to look at the words on my site in a completely different way. By viewing your content differently than you’ve ever done before, you open up the possibility of seeing the individual trees within your content forest again. Here’s a little exercise I like to use now and then.

Link Bartering

Link bartering is NOT the act of trading links (reciprocal linking), but is the act of trading services, which usually results in acquiring nice links and recommendations.

Creating Subliminal Connections Between Your Site and Hot Trends

What if you could associate your site, your niche, or your product with a hot new trend? What if the search results showed your site for that popular new gizmo or movie? What if I told you that you can create a subliminal connection between your site and any hot new gadget/movie/song/toy/etc. no matter what niche your site or product is in? And what if you stood a good chance of ranking well for that hot trend?

The Swirling Vortex of Social Networking

Social networking is increasingly becoming a vital aspect of our search marketing efforts. The connections we form amongst our online social communities can provide ever-expanding avenues of awareness of our sites, brand recognition, and ultimately buzz and link-love.

Sadly, however, there is a dark side to social networking. This dark side is one that we’d rather not talk about because we are afraid we might see it within ourselves. What could possibly be so scary? I call it the swirling vortex of social networking.

Using the Science of Social Proof in SEO

I’ve written about Robert Cialdini in the past and how his six persuasion principles can be used in search marketing. Briefly, the six principles are Liking, Reciprocity, Social Proof, Consistency, Authority, and Scarcity. All six are worth spending some serious study time with, but today I want to focus on just one – Social Proof.

Tracking Site Page Importance Via Crawl Cache Dates

A discussion centered around the realization that Google cache dates were the new PageRank and that crawl frequency is an excellent indicator of the importance of a page, which leads to an explanation in how to track this metric.

How To Create No-Fail Hot Content

Would you like your site content to rank well? Would you like your content to draw links like nails to a magnet? There is one strategy you can use to make sure the content you create is almost guaranteed to be a hit – and in the process it gathers backlinks and ranks well. This strategy isn’t some secret ninja tactic that would get your site banned if the search engines found out about it either. In fact, it’s a tactic that the search engines would be happy to recommend to all site owners.
And while the actual creation of the content may take some time and effort, the concept is extremely simple. So what is this awesome strategy?

Blueprint of a Successful SEO Campaign

The surest way to successfully construct a building is to follow a blueprint. A blueprint contains detailed plans and designs that enables skilled personnel to build the structure just from the blueprint. In the same way, a detailed set of plans is the surest way to build a successful search marketing campaign. And just like construction blueprints, while each SEO blueprint may be unique, each will also contain similar details to ensure success. What details should a search marketing blueprint contain?

SEO – Vital Inclusion to the Overall Marketing Mix

Companies are beginning to embrace SEO as a legitimate means of marketing, but they often throw a paltry amount of marketing dollars towards it, or they allocate most or all of the search budget to PPC only. That is a mistake, even for companies that don’t sell products or services online. Let’s take a look at some interesting statistics that will help show how important it is for companies to concentrate significant resources towards ranking well in the search engines’ organic rankings, which are the natural listings returned on the left side of the search results page.

When A Good Idea Goes Wrong – SEO Oopsies

If you search the Internet, you can find at least a few dozen lists that outline the common mistakes a newbie SEO might make. Just to make sure I don’t leave out the obligatory list, I’ll present it below. After that, however, I’ll detail what really happens when a beginner starts to see results from his or her first search marketing experiments.

This next batch is a series of posts I’ve done for SEO Chicks. Keep in mind that the SEO Chicks blog is a sometimes serious, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, sometimes just plain goofy look at the search world, so if some of these posts seem a little “less than professional”, that would be why.

Behavioral Based Ads Bad for Publishers and Scary for Users

Google just announced that it would start providing interest-based Adsense ads. I have a bit of experience with being a publisher that serves ad based on past user behavior and interests. That experience isn’t a very good one. If you are in the mood, follow along as I tell you my little tale of how behavior-based ads can be bad for everyone. (*names changed to protect the guilty and the innocent)

Dr. Phil Would Tell You That Stubborness Won’t Get You Higher Rankings

(A semi-fictional tale)

Despite the many changes, some folks just refuse to let go of the things they long to hold onto. Let’s consider the case of someone I like to call “Mr. Stubborn”.

If Google Is Unable to Remember Its Own Rules

Google, really, you just can’t expect everyone in the universe who owns a web site to follow your rules. You’ve just proven that by not following your own rules.

Finding SEO Inspiration

To be successful with your SEO campaign, you need to see beyond the simplistic ABC’s of search – looking past the typical optimization rules to get inspired. Find inspiration outside of the (chiclet) box, and you’ll likely find ways to improve both rankings and conversions!

Lets Call This Hypocrite Day Shall We?

There’s nothing new about this post. It’s been said before. But for those who still confuse ethics with believing whatever line of bull the search engines might be throwing out for their own betterment, I wanted to just put out a little reminder on this fine April day.

Link Building Ideas for the Link Building-Challenged

Since link building is about as fun as ripping off your own toenails with pliers, I thought it might be useful to spark some creative ideas into the heads of poor, depressed link builders. You know who you are. So without further ado, or maybe with lots of further ado, it depends on my mood …

The Evolution of a Newbie SEO

All the stages a noob goes through while learning SEO

SEO Conferences: Good Deal or No Deal?

I love SEO Conferences, but there’s a good possibility I’ll never attend another one. Why? Well, for one thing, after I tick off all the conference hosts today with this post, the SEO bouncers might block me from entering. But in reality, I may never go to another conference because the prices are just too freaking high. (please bear with me on this long rant, because really, you’ve GOT to read it all – seriously)

The Long Cold Wintery Days of SEO

The long, cold wintery days hold the same lures for SEOs. Trapped inside, bundled in warm, fuzzy pajamas or long-johns, the SEO prepares to strut his stuff. The goal: to seduce a bot into believing he holds the key to its spider-heart. Unfortunately, his mastery of the SEO process can be broken down into the same three primary stages as the lover.

Also, since most of these are SEO related, I thought I’d throw in a few posts that I wrote on my old SEO Scoop blog that might interest anyone interested in the above…

The 5 Goals of a Search Optimized Page

“How do I get my site to rank well?”. Start with understanding these 5 goals of a search optimized page, and then expand your knowledge with the resources compiled in the Beginner and Comprehensive Guides to SEO, Link Building, PPC, Social Media, Affiliate Marketing and Blogging post.

Beginner and Comprehensive Guides to SEO, Link Building, PPC, Social Media, Affiliate Marketing and Blogging

A quick roundup of ebooks and guides, both free and paid, that would be useful for anyone wanting organized how-to info to study on SEO, affiliate marketing, etc.

SEO for WordPress

The HTML version of a presentation I did at WordCamp Birmingham in 2008 which was all about, well, SEO for WordPress.

Finally, you might want to check out some of the back issues of Personal Branding Magazine to read my articles that focus on combining personal branding with SEO, along with fantastic articles from lots of other writers as well. Hope some of those are useful to some of you.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: ABC, Birmingham, energy, Google, HTML, king, Link Building, online social communities, player, Robert Cialdini, search budget, search engines, search marketing, search marketing blueprint, search marketing campaign, search marketing efforts, search marketing experiments, search results, search world, SEO, SEOs, social media attention, social networking, Vital Inclusion
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.