User Comments

1. 

   7/14/07

   sanktjohanser

   You said it, interesting is about it. I don't think it's very functional though.
   
   The link specifics especially were way off.

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2. 

   7/14/07

   MadameX

   I'm not sure--it will only let me check two sites a day, so it's hard to get a solid handle on how accurate it is. However, it did rate our oldest site, which is currently ranked # 7 for our primary term and appears on the first page for dozens of other competitive terms LOWER than another of our sites which I know to have slightly lower rankings, fewer backlinks, fewer pages of content online, and is much newer. I'll be interested to see what the rest show.

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3. 

   7/14/07

   clioandme

   Well, for my homepage, which has a PR 1, it gives me a 6.5 out of 10 and then the following sales pitch: "You're running with the big brands and sites, making content that engines and visitors can't help but gobble up. All that's left now is to leverage your power and push ever onwards, towards utter ubiquity." The numbers seem to like the domain, which of course makes sense, since my homepage is located at homepage.mac.com, but why I should benefit from that for my little old site makes less sense, since apparently only nine links point to it: homepage.mac.com/markstoneman Whatever.

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   1. 

      7/14/07

      MadameX

      Stoneman, your home page got a better score than my (in my TotalAttorneys clothes, of course) bankruptcy site, which has a PR 5, about 1500 backlinks showing in Google (some from places like bankrate.com), several hundred pages online, and first-page ranking for the term "bankruptcy". According to Quantcast, the site receives over a hundred thousand unique visitors a month.
      
      Perhaps I'm oversimplifying, but this comparison alone may illustrate the value of this tool...
4. 

   7/14/07

   clioandme

   For my tumblelog, on the other hand, which has a PR of n/a, I get a 2 out of 10 with this pitch: "Your website/page is a relative unknown. Search engines and humans are (for the time being) infrequent visitors. Consider the accessibility of the URL, the desirability of the content and your marketing efforts online; all can have great impact on your reach."

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5. 

   7/14/07

   Norski

   SEO is a legitimate pursuit, but I've decided to approach the issue from the other end.
   
   After reading about what search engines supposedly look for, and seeing what sites did (and didn't) show up on searches, my approach to SEO now is to:
   

   • Stay on one topic per page, as much as possible
   • Put a keyword, at least, in the page title
   • Write for the reader, but when there's a choice, use a generic keyword rather than technical jargon or slang("computer" for example, rather than "Macintosh SE FDHD")
   • Technically, keep it simple: reserve Flash or other fancy display code for special occasions
   • Even if you use something else for your navigation, have a plain old HTML set of links to connected pages in your site somewhere on the page

   
   
   So far, it's worked pretty well for me. But then, maybe I've got low standards

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