SEO Analysis - Compare yourself to other Websites and improve your SEO Rankings

I am reading a lot blogs. Those blogs are about SEO, affiliate marketing, and online business in general. One of the blogs I have in my feed reader is David Lithman’s blog. He writes about his online ventures and is pretty much doing similar stuff online compared to me. With my increased interest in Search Engine Optimization I thought it might be a neat idea to see what he is doing for search engine optimization of his blog. Why his blog? Well, our blogs are pretty similar in traffic, PR, and topic. I know what I did to SEO my site and by analyzing somebody else’s website it can help me and my readers to see how SEO can look like. I am not saying he is a specialist in SEO (nor am I), but it can be a fun experience with a small learn effect maybe. Let’s get going.

Let’s check some of the basics first.

Links pointing to full URL: 160
(Source: Yahoo Site Explorer)
Position at Google for first four words of title tag on target URL: #1
(Source: Google)
Age of Domain: 483 Days
Links from domains with .edu or .gov TLDs: 0
(Source: Yahoo)
Google Page Rank: 5
(Source: Google)
Alexa Ranking: 162922
(Source: Alexa.com)
Domain name visibility: 548
(Source: Google / Google Search for Domain)
Internal Links to Home Page: 99.9%
(Source: Yahoo)
Number of Links / Technorati: 1894
(Source: Technorati)
No links have been recorded at del.icio.us / Wkipedia / DMOZ
Pages indexed: 536
(Source: Google)

Lithman.net features search engine friendly URLs. The post title also makes for the page title. A crawl test from the home page shows 49 direct hits = pages that can be indexed. 48 of those pages are indexed in Google, zero (0) of those pages are in Yahoo, and 44 of those pages are in MSN. 46 of these 49 pages have a unique title tag, while 3 have a duplicate title tag. 47 of the 49 pages do not have a meta description tag. A keyword analysis shows that the main keyword recorded is “david”. There are no clear trends of what main group of keywords David Lithman might be targeting for his blog to rank for.

This gives you a pretty good impression of how David Lithman’s blog is doing from an SEO standpoint. There are certainly pieces David can improve. I would probably recommend to a) include a meta description (not meta keywords) into the site and b) to eventually start targeting specific keywords he wants to rank for and include those more in blog posting titles and the blog postings itself. David has done a great job in getting links from other blogs and shows a pretty good Alexa ranking (please note: I am not saying Alexa Data is worth anything in general). David has a solid number of subscribers to his RSS feed. David also did a great job in regards to content. 536 pages indexed on a domain just 483 days old is not too shabby.

Looking at my own blog after reading this and comparing a few things I might have to change a few things around. The crawl test for my blog shows less results, however I am using a Google sitemap that has been submitted to allow for proper indexing. But it can certainly not hurt to improve the link structure itself on my website. I do seem to have better keyword targeting in place and better usage of the meta description tag. My blog has more incoming links in general, but fewer links from other blogs according to technorati. That is certainly something I will need to work on - especially as I am using Text Link Ads to earn money and they use the technorati rankings as part of to determine how “valuable” my website is for advertisers.

Conclusion: By looking at other websites from an SEO perspective I have been able to gather valuable information for what I need to do, to make my own websites more successful. Finding websites that are similar in type and topic can be a good starting point to do research, compare, and take action. There is action I will have to take for sure to bring this blog to the next level. I will have to go back now and pick some of my other websites and take them apart the same way to find things I can improve.

PS: I hope David Lithman does not mind that I took his website as an example.