I regularly read an ezine from Larry Chase, who operates a site called Web Digest For Marketers. In his current issue, Mr. Chase lists a number of Search Engine Optimization tools, one of which is a web page analysis tool from seomoz.org.

According to Larry, this tool:

“…was designed to give marketers a quick, one-stop, bird’s eye view of just how “strong” a given page on your website really is. The analysis is based upon a number of interesting factors, including the number of human-created mentions your website has (del.icio.us tags, Alexa Rank, mentions at Wikipedia, etc.), how old your website is, the quality of your site’s inbound links and a variety of search engine-based results (the number of pages indexed, internal link percent, PageRank, etc.).”

I thought I’d punch up http://www.californiawinehikes.com/ and see the results of the tool’s analysis of my website’s home page.

In effect, the result was:

The seomoz.org’s results page goes on to state:

“Although not a considerable presence, your site/page is making inroads online. Visitor traffic and search engine visibility is within your grasp.”

I think that’s pretty good, considering my site is only 8 months old. But I’m going to keep working it. As I continue to gain more subscribers to this blog and links from other related sites, I’ll revisit this analysis and report the findings.

If you have a website, you might also want to check out how much pull you’ve got out there on the Great Bucksaw that is the Internet.

~winehiker

If you have a website that you intend to market on the Internet via search engines (such as Google) and directories (such as Yahoo!), I have a little advice for you.

If you prefer to submit your site the hard way, you can try to find the hundreds of site-submittal pages yourself, or you can hire someone to “hand submit” for you. If you choose the former, you’ll spend needless hours researching, then keying in different data into countless gateway scripts. If you choose the latter, like I originally did with ineedhits.com, you may be repeatedly charged for a subscription that is not mentioned anywhere on their “Buy Now” page.

In the case of ineedhits.com, after I saw the subsequent charge and complained, they refused to reverse the charges, claiming (of course) that I agreed to a monthly subscription. I returned to the site I bought their service from and found no mention whatsover about any subscription, nor any mention about repeated monthly charges. I feel that sort of business tactic is inherently, if not incredibly, dishonest. Unfortunately it is all too common on the World Wide Web.

So, I suggest you make it easy on your time and your pocketbook. But most of all (emphasis strongly implied), do not do business with ineedhits.com, ever. Period.

Now for the good news. I’ve come to learn about a very cost-effective site that helped me. With selfpromotion.com, I was able to submit my website, California Wine Hikes, to a number of search engines and directories without a lot of work, and with very little cost. For a one-time fee of $10, I not only could submit to all the major engines and directories, but I can also track the status of my submittals, optimize for the search engines’ spiders, and much more. There is also a lot of great content on the site to learn from. Using this nearly-free and valuable service, I’ve been able to elevate my page ranking in Google from 1 to 5 almost instantly.

If selfpromotion.com interests you, I suggest you check it out.

~winehiker