by Brent Winters
If you’ve had a chance to try WebPosition Gold 3 released in August, you may have noticed that the Page Critic report is now divided into six tabs. As this report is so crucial to improving your rankings on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other engines, I believe the new format merits some explanation.
The first tab of the Page Critic report is simply a consolidation of the other report areas found on the remaining five tabs. This first tab is useful for those that wish to print the entire report, or for those that prefer to see everything all on one page. It provides an impressive volume of SEO advice and can be rather overwhelming at first glance.
The remaining five tabs serve to divide the content into smaller, more digestible pieces. These areas guide you through the process of tuning your Web page to the preferences of your selected search engine. The tabs are entitled Page Averages, Page Advice, Engine Advice, Page Analysis, Page Properties.
Everyone’s Web site and target market is different. While there are some commonalities, most search engines rank pages based on differing criteria. Therefore, it’s important to realize that the Page Critic custom tailors its advice for the specific Web page, keyword, and search engine that you select.
Page Averages:
The simplest way to improve your page rankings is to mimic the major attributes that cause other pages to rank at the top of the list. In September, I discussed the various comparison tools that WebPosition makes available to you. One of these methods is to compare your page’s key attributes to the averages of other pages that already rank in the top 5 positions. For example, if the average top-ranking page on Google includes 5 words in the title tag area, then you should logically do the same in your title. In reality, you will not find every top-ranking page having precisely 5 words in the title. There’s often a range of “acceptable” values that Google will give preference to. Therefore, you will notice that the Page Averages report will advise you to conform to a particular range of acceptable values. For example:
A word count from 4 to 6 is suggested for the Title area. Your word count is 12 right now so you might consider decreasing your word count in the Title.
A keyword frequency from 1 to 7 is suggested for the Link Text area. Your frequency is 0.0 right now so you might consider increasing your Keyword count in the Link Text.
A word count from 1 to 270 is suggested for the Link Text area. Your word count is 0 right now so you might consider increasing your word count in the Link Text.
You’ll notice that in some cases, the range is fairly narrow like 4 to 6 words in the title area. In other cases, the range is broad, such as 1 to 270 words in the link text area. These values are based upon how widely top ranking pages deviate from the average.
If your page has 7 words in the title, rather than 4 to 6 words, does that mean your page can’t rank at the top of the list? No, of course not. There’s more than one way to rank at the top. WebPosition’s report is only meant to be a useful guide to what the typical top-ranking page should look like.
In addition, some factors will be less influential than others. For example, your title tag will almost always have more influence on your ranking than your meta keyword tag. However, your best strategy is to tune your page to mimic as many of the averages as possible.
To save you time, only the “problem” areas will be mentioned on the Page Averages tab. If your title already has the optimal number of words, then WebPosition will not make any suggestions for that area.
Tip: If any of this search engine marketing terminology is confusing, you’ll find many of the terms hyperlinked in the Page Critic report. Simply click on the underlined words to learn more
Page Advice:
Like the Page Averages tab, the Page Advice tab contains WebPosition’s suggestions based on your selected Web page, engine, and keyword. In contrast to the previous tab, Page Advice includes all the page-specific tips that are unrelated to average word counts or average prominence. Instead, you’ll find that WebPosition scans for missing tags and other elements that should be either present or excluded from a top-ranking page. For many well-built pages, this list will be relatively short as only the “problem” areas will be flagged.
Engine Advice:
Here you will find a wealth of engine specific advice. There’s so many advice items to help you improve your rankings, that this section has been organized into eight categories:
- What’s New – Tips added within the last few months.
- Keyword Selection – Advice for choosing the best keywords.
- Relevancy Tips – Techniques for improving your page’s relevancy to the search engines. The more relevant an engine finds your page, the higher you will rank.
- Link Popularity – Strategies for building your link popularity to increase your traffic and your rankings.
- Submission and Getting Indexed – Guidelines for proper submission.
- Spam Warnings – Educate yourself on best practices and how to avoid spamming a search engine.
- Marketing Strategies – Online marketing techniques that will work hand in hand with your search engine marketing strategy.
- Other Information – Search engine news and miscellaneous SEO tips.
Page Analysis:
This tab gives you a table showing the keyword frequency, word count, keyword weight, and prominence of your page compared to your competitors. If you’re serious about optimizing your page, this is the place to go. While the Page Averages tab gives you much of this data in easy to understand sentence form, here you’ll see all the statistical data at glance. The exact averages are given here rather than “ranges.”
The Page Analysis table divides your page into “areas” such as title, meta tags, link text, body, and so forth. You can then compare each area of your page to one or more top ranking pages. Some areas that are known to be ignored by the selected search engine will be omitted by default from this report. That way you don’t waste time optimizing page areas that an engine does not even index.
Page Properties:
The final tab on the Page Critic report contains a list of useful traits relating to the page being analyzed such as whether it uses frames, contains java script, or repeats the same keyword more than once in a row.
Conclusion:
While the scope and breadth of the Page Critic module may look a little intimidating at first, you’ll quickly learn your way around it. Although WebPosition is well known for it’s impressive rank reporting features, you’ll find the Page Critic module to be the key to improving those rankings. After all, it does you no good to submit your pages and to track your positions if you don’t work to improve those rankings.
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Tags: Engine Advice, Page Advice, Page Analysis, Page Averages, Page Critic, Page Properties, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, WebPosition
