Once you do, you get all kinds of neat facts, statistics and advice on what you can do to improve your website’s score.

Just to give you an example of how this website works – Mitchelaneous got a score of 97 – which I think is pretty darn good.  So what does that mean exactly?

A website grade of 97/100 for www.mitchelaneous.com means that of the millions of websites that have previously been evaluated, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 97% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness. The algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over 50 different variables, including search engine data , website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others.

Some of the places where it says I need improvement are the fact that I have "too many images" on the website, which I don’t really see as that much of a factor.  Also, I need to apparently renew my domain this year.

Now, like with any automated service – you have to learn how to take the advice you are given.  No website can take the place of learning the ropes when it comes to learning how to really create a fantastic website – however Website Grader can get you pointed in the right direction.

To give it a shot on your own website, be sure to go visit websitegrader.com.

When you are starting up a new website, one of the big concerns seems to be if the search engines have found it yet. I have talked with many a stressed out webmaster who have lost their faith in the world, just because Google has not yet crawled their newly launched website.  Here are a few suggestions to make sure your website gets found by the search engines out there.

Get Links Back to Your Website: The oldest technique is often still the best one to use to make sure you get crawled by Google.  Make sure you get other like-minded websites to link back t your new website.  Google crawls through links, so if the indexing robots finds a link to your website – it will make the jump and start looking around your website too.

Request to be Listed/Crawled: You can also request search engines crawl your website.  While Google still have it’s old add your URL to Google page still up – the better way to do this is to setup a Google Webmaster account.  Both Bing and Yahoo provide you with the same tools to make sure your websites are listed in those engines too.

This article should help you when it comes to finding the right places to register:

• Search Engine Webmaster Tool Collections

Don’t Fall for Search Engine Optimization Gimmicks: There are a lot of places online that will boast that they can get you listed in 1,000 different search engines for just 4 monthly payments of $49.99 (or something to that effect).  There is nothing they can do that you can’t do on your own.

Now, the most important tip I can give you is to give it time.  If you launch a website on Monday, that doesn’t mean that Tuesday your website will be listed all over Google.  Spend time building up your content and giving the various search engines great content to find. By doing that, and the steps above – you will soon forget about being stressed over not being listed and satisfying an entirely new audience of people coming in from the search engines.

Search engine optimization is another form of marketing, you you might not have thought was marketing before.  SEO, at it’s core, is the process of improving visibility of a website in search engines by learning what works and what doesn’t work – as far as website content goes. Your website is one of the most important ways you can reach new eyeballs or clients, so lets learn more about how you can do so more successfully. 

Here are my top ten marketing search engine optimization tweaks you should make to your layout.

1. Make sure you setup a XML sitemap and get it submitted to Google, Bing and Yahoo.  This gives each of these big search engines a roadmap as to what you want indexed, and how important each webpage is.
2. Make sure that each page has a unique set of meta tags and a unique title too.  You want these details to reflect the content of the webpage you are looking at.
3. Find other websites that share content like yours, and see what you can do to get links coming from their website to yours.  You might offer a link exchange, or something more.  Use your imagination.
4. Create a website that is easy to use.  This will do more to build up your popularity with people, and in turn could result in more links back to your website content.
5. Do not be afraid to not index certain pages that might be seen by Google ad duplicate content.  For example, on my own websites I never ask for the search engines to index any of the category pages.  It is much more valuable if they index each story or post I write.
6. Pay attention to your website statistics.  You can use the statistics package your website hosting came with, or another tool like Google Analytics to quickly see what your popular pages are.  Once you see the popular pages, start to check out the keywords and sources of traffic – so you can try to duplicate this same thing that made that webpage popular again.
7. Use the headline tag hierarchy correctly.  When writing up a webpage, make sure the h1 tag goes at the top, h2 is next, and then h3 and so forth if you need them.  Not only does this make your webpage more usable by the reader – search engines also like it when you correctly divide your content up using these HTML tags.
8. Do not get too worked up over what a website’s Google PageRank is.  It is only one small part in how Google ranks websites and lists them in the search engine results.  Just because website has a high PageRank number, that does not mean it will get listed first in the search engine results.
9. Write excellent content.  This one might seem like a no brainer, but you would be amazed by the number of people who come to me with one sentence on a webpage and then ask me why they are not getting listed in search engine results. Search engines love content – feed it to them.
10. Give people something they want to link back to.  Some people might say link baiting is bad, but in all honesty it is just excellent content that people want to share. 

One more thing you should remember is that there is no perfect science when it comes to optimizing your website content for the search engines.  It is much more a process of trial and error.  These basic tips though should help you set the foundation for a great website you can use to market your ideas, products or whatever else you have to market to the public.

Here are just a few topics from this week’s episode of the Web Hosting Show.

• Domain Name Keyword Tools!
• Dedicated Web Hosting for Web 2.0!
• Best Ways to Get Videos Read for the Web?
• Optimize Your Web Site Images and Flash!
• What is a Reseller Web Hosting Account?

So go check out the show notes and listen for yourself on the Web Hosting Show web site! Episode 128 is on the air and ready for download.

Topic specific content: Place content on pages that is uniform. For instance, if you are a web host, create a full page just talking about dedicated hosting. This gives the specific page an edge over other companies who discuss all of their plans on one page (because of your higher percentage of topic-specific keywords).

Descriptive short titles: Use short titles (5-7 words), with the most specific information appearing earliest. For instance, if you are a web host, and you have a dedicated hosting page, a good title would be: dedicated hosting, reliable service by PowerHost.

The long titles don’t work well because they are more likely to be viewed as spam pages by Google, as well as confuse readers. Most people know where they are once they are on a site, and have more use for the location within the site before the site name.

Proper Headings: Use the H1-H5 tags in HTML in order to let your visitors and search engines understand what is important relative to the rest of your content. For example, make a short paragraph on each page that describes the page, and title it in an H1 heading.

This has become a very common feature of Web 2.0 sites since it both helps your Search Engine Optimization efforts and assists in clarity of your site among readers.

Contextual Linking: Include links that match your content topic in your content. You can either link to internal pages on your site, or related pages on other sites. The links however, should include titles, not just display the URL (for example: Online News).

Google checks these links and uses it to “classify” sites. They assume that links will have relevant text to the site they are linking to.

This of course, is just a quick “tune up” of your site, there are many other search engine optimization methods you can use to rank highly in Google and other top search engines.

Article by Pinny Cohen – Pinny has been optimizing sites for clients for almost a decade, and specializes in the web hosting industry’s keywords. He runs a blog over at http://www.pinnycohen.com which covers many topics including marketing, web 2.0, consumer behavior, entrepreneurialism, and healthy living.