Recently the kind folks over at SEOmoz developed a slick new tool which allows you to calculate what they refer to as your “Page Strength”.
According to the creators of the Page Strength Tool (Matt Inman and Rand Fishman):
“SEOmoz’s Page Strength tool is intended to serve as an alternative to Google’s PageRank score in the toolbar, offering insight into how valuable, important and popular a site or page is as compared to others on the web…The tool is designed to satisfy the curiosity of webmasters, surfers and web marketing professionals seeking a better metric to quickly assess a site/page’s relative importance and visibility.”
What will the tool tell you?
- The relative importance and visibility of a webpage
- The potential strength and ability of a page to rank in the search engines
- Data on popularity, links, and mentions of the page across the web
How does it work?
Simply enter your URL and let the tool do the rest. You will receive a calculation of your overall page strength along with a report card outlining how well you are doing in each of the areas that contribute to the score, including:
- Number of links pointing to the full URL
- Number of links pointing to the domain
- Position at Google for the first four words of the title tag on the target URL
- Age of the Domain
- Number of links from domains with .edu TLDs
- Number of links from domains with .gov TLDs
- Alexa Rank and Google PageRank of full URL and Domain
- Domain name visibility
- Internal link percentage
- Number of search results for a URL search at del.icio.us
- Number of Listings in DMOZ (ODP)
- Number of links found in Wikipedia
After trying it out – I think this tool is great! It supplies you with a nice snapshot of your SEO efforts and helps you identify the areas that need improvement. You can also use the tool to strengthen your competitive analysis (apply it to your competitor’s sites to see how you measure up) and to rate potential link partners within your industry.
If you are a hyper-analytical person (like me), you are definitely going to question the methodology behind this tool (check out this post from the SEOmoz blog for more info). The point, however, is that regardless of the score returned, the data obtained will undoubtedly provide you with a much more detailed picture of your sites overall web presence than Google’s PageRank.
While I would not choose to ignore PageRank, the Page Strength tool is very useful for internet marketers, web developers and SEOs looking to get a more detailed look at the value of their site. A welcome addition to my growing arsenal of SEO resources – thank you SEOmoz!
If you like this tool, you will also want to check out Aaron Wall’s SEO for Firefox extension. It allows you to pull important marketing metrics directly into your Google and Yahoo SERPs.
These new tools represent the next step in page ranking technologies. Our demand for more highly detailed page ranking information is now being answered. It will be interesting to see what type of response this ignites – a new addition to the Google Toolbar maybe? Probably not.