SEO Tools for Analyzing Website Performance

SEO (search engine optimization) is one of those areas that can be often seen as a dark art. Thankfully, there's plenty of tools out there to help you analyze how your website is performing and suggest how you can make improvements. They measure traffic, inbound links, page rank, social reach, directories you are listed in, how easy it is for the search spiders to crawl, etc.

In this article we look at two popular SEO analysis tools, HubSpot's Website Grader and WooRank, and see how the SubHub.com website performed.

HubSpot's Website Grader

Website Grader comprehensively analyzes your website, according to the following criteria:

• Blog inclusion and ranking
• Indexed Google pages
• Readability level
• Meta tags
• Domain age
• MozRank
• Inbound links
• Listing in Yahoo! Directory
• Delicious bookmarks
• Twitter grade
• Inclusion of RSS feed and contact form
• Alexa traffic rank

Our website, SubHub.com, ranks 9,401 of the 2,334,112 websites that have been ranked so far by Website Grader, giving us a website grade of 99.6/100. That gets a big thumbs up from us!

According to Website Grader, a website grade of 99.6 means that of the 2,334,112 websites that have previously been evaluated, their algorithm has calculated that our site scores higher than 99.6% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness.

 
WooRank

WooRank (the 'new kid on the block', when it comes to grading tools) analyzes a website in a similar way to Hubspot's Website Grader, using the follow key ranking criteria:

• Monthly traffic estimation
• Alexa rank
• Compete rank
• Indexed pages
• Popular pages
• Meta tags and page analysis
• Website compliance
• Backlinks
• Directory inclusion
• Delicious links
• Digg entries
• Twitter links
• Wikipedia backlinks
• Feed inclusion
• Readability level
• Load time

SubHub.com has a grade of 67, where the average rank of sites analyzed to date is 50.2. This places us at 17,102nd out of 217,943 ranked websites.

In Summary

Both Hubspot's Website Grader and the new WooRank beta have an impressive range of ranking criteria and again both services offer excellent suggestions for how to improve areas that you are failing on.

I was surprised to see such a disparancy in rank for our own SubHub website. WooRank is still in beta, so i'm more inclined to believe Hubspot's Website Grader, which has been out in the wild for well over a year now (plus i'm biased, as Website Grader scores us better!). However, i'll be following WooRank with interest to see how its service develops.

For obvious reasons neither service gives away the exact formula it uses to rank websites. I'd recommend you check them both out and let us know your thoughts below.