A colleague recommended that I take a look a free SEO tool available at http://www.websitegrader.com

If you want to do a quick SEO analysis of a website all you need to do is paste the URL of the website into the box provided and click at the bottom of the page. Within seconds you have a detailed report of the website which includes an on-page and off-page SEO analysis of the metadata, traffic rank, the date of the last Google crawl, Google rank, Blog information and readability level. The report even gives your website a grade.

The website grader is completely free and is a fantastic tool to test whether or not your webpage is looking the way it should be. It’s very simple to use and doesn’t contain a lot of jargon so even if you don’t know a lot about SEO the report will give you valuable pointers on how to improve your website.

I ran a test on the Clicks2Customers website and was pleased to see that we had result of ninety-five out of hundred. Our Google page rank is six and our blog and RSS feed earned our site some extra points. What was interesting to find was our traffic rank. According to http://www.websitegrader.com, our website has an Alexa rank of 256,529 which is in the top 2.14% of all websites.

Website Grader does give you option to track your competitors web activity as well which makes a very handy tool to have.

Ok, so i’ve completely thrown the idea of live blogging out of the window due to non-existing internet connectivity but i’ll be posting my notes one by one in the coming days…

Keynote day 3: Jason Calacanis from Mahalo.com

Jason has quite a reputation as an industry renegade, so I looked quite forward to his session. For those of you who don’t know Jason, his recent venture is a ‘human-powered’ search engine. So instead of relying on fancy algorithms like Google, Jason relies on human editing to provides searches with relevant results.

Jason started off by clarifying his stance on SEO, as he’s generally known as the guy who thinks SEO is ‘absolute BS’. He now said that as far as SEO is about building relevant, user-friendly sites, he’s all for it :).
Mahalo looks similar to the old directory sites (and which failed one by one) but Jason believes their failure was due to their decreasing quality content. Mahalo with its human editing weeds out bad content.

The problem with this concept is though that the amount of work increases as the number of pages on the site increases. Not only do new pages need to be added, but all pages need to be maintained. To solve that problem, Mahalo is creating community involvement (like Wikipedia) to reduce their workload. Mahalo users have an interest in keeping the contents clean and relevant.

Another benefit of Mahalo is that site owners have input in the content that is being displayed on the search engine, unlike at other search engines. I believe that is a major selling point for a lot of merchants and big brands, who feel disempowered by the ‘big three’ regarding the information that is indexed and served to search engine users. Mahalo’s role is limited to doing QA on the content that is being submitted (about 20% of the links submitted by website owners are accepted). Spam doesn’t exist on Mahalo because they have no way of making it into the index

An additional feature of Mahalo is that it tries to combine search with the social graph (i.e. your social connections). Mahalo users can see who referred their search results, find movies recommended by their friends, etc. To do this Mahalo interacts with a number of online social networking sites to aggregate your social connections. That said, Jason doesn’t always believe in asking permission before scraping content from other website. He says asking for forgives gets you further :).

Jason made a very good point saying that what search needs is less pages, not more. Think about it, most searches on google generate millions of results and hardly anyone ever looks past the top ten. The industry should go back to valuing quality of quantity.

Mahalo would best be suited for the ‘mid-tail’. Google and other engines are pretty good at serving the long tail and the short tail. Getting the middle ground right is more difficult according to Jason. That’s where the human element and the social element of search can add value.

As an SEM company with a global reach, we were very interested in getting some feedback from other people regarding their experiences.

The panel included online marketers from Japan, China, Singapore, Australia and Latin America.

Common to all these (and other) countries is that they are much more diverse than the US. Not only do many have multiple official languages but there are also cultural linguistic differences within languages. In asian countries one is also confronted by the problem of the character sets, and the search engine’s interpretation of ‘context’.

In China and Japan, there are multiple ways of expressing intent and different demographic groups use a different vocabulary.

Australia is the exception in that it is fairly homogeneous but Internet penetration is not as great as expected from a 1st world country, and relatively few users have broadband.

In Japan and Singapore on the other hand broadband is widespread and users are internet savvy. In Japan people can even scan bar-codes with their cellphones to compare prices online. Really cool stuff which shows the enormous potential of mobile search.

The Chinese market is massive, yet difficult to penetrate, even Google plays second fiddle to Baidu, the Chinese search engine giant. E-commerce is still fairly small in China and it seems to me the country is about a decade behind the US in terms of web usage (e.g. portals are the biggest sites in China)

Overall, the panelists confirmed what we experience in practice: every country is different and it is crucial to understand the local culture in order to set up a successful campaign. Don’t outsource your keywords and adcopy to a translation agency and expect that you’ll end up with a performing campaign. You need native speakers to understand the intricacies of foreign markets. And even then, not all foreign ventures are a guaranteed success…

Ok, not quite. The idea was to post summaries of the sessions presented at SES in real time but the reality is that having hundreds of people trying to connect to the same wireless network at the same time results in agonizing connectivity not seen in the modern world since the early nineties.

However, today Derrick and I found the Internet (see picture) and to our surprise, no one else seemed to be using it (hence the stunned look on my face).

We are now online and will be posting our session summaries shortly…

Without Website Analytics search marketers would only be obsessed with generating endless amounts of traffic.

There are many analytics tools on the internet that a webmaster or analyst could use to monitor where their traffic is coming from and how users navigate through their website.

Personally, I just make use of Google Analytics and also sometimes install CrazyEgg.

Most of you probably know what Google Analytics is all about, so I am going to focus on CrazyEgg.

One of the main features of CrazyEgg is the Heatmap, in fact this is the main reason why I sometimes include CrazyEgg on the websites I build.

In a nutshell the Heatmap allows you to see what’s hot and what’s not and it illustrates this is such an easy way to analyze.

I think CrazyEgg is a very important tool for webmasters that care about what their users do and in return aim at optimizing usability for their users.

I noticed the other day, CrazyEgg promoting a new feature called Confetti. According to their website, this allows you to dig a little deeper and find out where people click based upon things like: Top 15 Referrers, Search Terms, Operating System, Browser etc.

Although CrazyEgg is not a completely a free service, it does a allow you to track 5000 visitors per month.

With the combination of these two services (Google Analytics and CrazyEgg), I can get many useful bits of information from my website visitors.

This is just really a simple introduction, most analytics services offer a lot of more information including Bounce Rate, Top Entry and Exit pages and also allow you to setup goals. I will write more about this in another post, so watch this space.

My colleague Derrick and I are attending SES New York next week. If you interested in meeting up or having a chat, feel free to contact us and we’ll make a plan.

Our details are on this page.