I have been researching high-quality website graders. I am not satisfied. And you should not be either. Here’s how the average web grader goes. You put in your URL, it spins for a while, then it spits out some information. The average webgrader will include things such as, number of backlinks, page rank, perhaps the keywords you rank on, and then a bunch of onsite seo stuff. Most of the onsite SEO stuff is fairly useless. Yes, useless. The title tag is important. The density of critical keywords is important. But much of the other stuff is fluff. It doesn’t really tell you how your website will rank in the major search engines. What’s missing?

Simple….

You should be benchmarking your website against competitors in a similar space as yours. A high quality web grader should be giving you the dirt on how you stack up against others who want to rank on the same terms as you. After all, these are the real competition in the search engines for you… How many backlinks do they have? How many backlinks do you have? What are your relative positions in the search engines. To me, a good web grader will address SEO from an off-site perspective since it is SO much more important than the onsite stuff which you probably already have covered.

Also, I want to see root domains linking to me, not Yahoo Site explorer backlink counts. Those suck.  First of all, Yahoo has been declining in accuracy for years. I suspect they will shut down the site explorer backlink counts soon. Secondly, they count raw links. You want to know root domain links as these are MUCH more important for ranking. And you want to know root domain backlinks in relation to your competitors – again benchmarking.  A good webgrader will have this for you…. Where can you find this for free?