Do you ever wonder why some sites show up for search terms and others just never come up?
I love this quote by on Hubspot’s blog.
Anne Carelli, Digital Communications Manager for Coke. She said:
“Several years ago, Coke realized that Coke.com is not their home page – it is Google.com, digg.com and YouTube. Take the time to keep abreast of what is showing up for your brand in these new social sites and search engines.”
So how do you dominate for keyword search terms. It’s actually very, very difficult to do but if you want to, you should start with understanding where you are in the first place.
There’s a lot you can learn from a simple free download plugin for Firefox called SEO for Firefox.

After you download this plug-in, do a Google Search for your website. I’m going to use Notre Dame Science as an example. Marissa and I just did this the other day for her site so I’m hoping she doesn’t mind.
Here’s what the SEO tool showed us.
- 6 PR: (Google PageRank) an estimated measure of global link authority
- 11-1996 Age: age pulled from Archive.org, shows the first time a page was indexed by Archive.org’s spider. The theory is that if Archive.org found a page so did many of the major search engines.
- 385,000 Links: (Yahoo! linkdomain) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a domain
- 29,500 .edu Link: (Yahoo! .edu linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a domain
- 9 .edu Page Link: (Yahoo! .edu link ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a specific page
- 859 .gov Link: (Yahoo! .gov linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .gov links pointing at a domain
- 61 Page Links: (Yahoo! link) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a page
- 1 del.icio.us: number of times a URL has been bookmarked on Del.icio.us. Heavily skewed toward techy / Web 2.0 stuff.
- 0 Technorati: an estimate of the total number of links to a site from blogs
- 18,612 Alexa: rank based on website traffic . Heavily skewed toward internet marketing and webmaster related resources.
- 131,000 Cached: (Google site:) shows how many pages from a site are indexed in Google
- 360 dmoz: searches the Google Directory to count the total number of pages from a site that are listed in DMOZ, and the total number of pages listed in DMOZ that reference that URL.
- 0 Bloglines: shows you how many people are subscribed to a particular blog via Bloglines.
- 4,753 dir.yahoo.com: is a site listed in the Yahoo! Directory or not.
- WhoIs: makes it easy to look up the whois data for any site.
What does all this mean? Well, if you take a snapshot of your website like this and then do the same thing with your competitors. You can compare the two and then use this as a benchmark as you execute some of your tactics to make your website more powerful.
I also use www.websitegrader.com to see if there are other things that I can improve on a site. science.nd.edu fared pretty well here.
How is your website?
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