Ok guys it’s time to take a look at an online business to evaluate what they’re doing right, and what they’re doing wrong. I love having the opportunity to do these evaluations because it gives us something practical to discuss. Being featured in this type of study on Court’s Internet Marketing School is a paid service, but has nothing to do with the ridiculous paid reviews that other sites are doing. These evaluations are intended to expose critical errors, give good ideas for your sites, and praise what’s being done correctly.

SEO Meter Takes Care Of A Need

When Google is evaluating your site, they will use a lot of different factors to determine where to rank it. Getting Google to crawl your site often is a huge step in achieving good rankings, especially if your site reports any type of news. When news breaks, you want be able to write about it quickly - and you need Google to find it almost instantly.

A perfect example of this is when I first wrote a post about Izea RealRank. The post was indexed instantly, and it turned out I was one of the first to write about this concept. You will still find me on the first page of Google for multiple ways people search for this:

• Realrank
• Izea RealRank
• Real Rank
• Izea Real Rank

Since I was one of the first to write about this subject, I became an instant authority on the matter. Google has kept me as an authority on RealRank ever since, and this has resulted in steady traffic from people seeking information about it.

Now this wouldn’t have been possible if Google didn’t crawl my site frequently. When I publish a post, I get almost instant indexing, almost every time. This helps me because if any news ever breaks, I can get indexed before many other sites that write about it.

Ok now assuming that you need to know how often Google crawls your site, how do you test that crawl rate? That’s where SEO Meter comes into play. Once you add your site to SEO Meter, they will determine your crawl rate and keep track of results. You can go back and check these results as often as you would like.

Brandability

SEO Meter is a brilliant name for a brand and I can see this site growing into a very valuable service. I do have some ideas to make this better, and I will discuss those later. The first thing I noticed when I went to the site was the logo, which you should all take a look at. There’s no doubt that the SEO Meter logo was done by a professional and it gives the site a very professional feel. I’m not going to show a picture here because you should all have a look at the site anyway. I’m considering upgrading both the web design and logo of my site, because you need a professional look to have a flagship site.

This is the kind of site that I would love to start. It has a good idea, feels a need, and is very brandable.

Things I Would Change

Ok the first thing I would do is upgrade the method used to determine Google’s crawl rate. Right now the site is using Google’s cache to determine this, and the results aren’t going to be entirely accurate that way. I would keep the existing tool and would label it as a Google cache rate tool, and would then create a new tool altogether.

The new tool would be harder to build, but would still be pretty straightforward. I would use the Statcounter approach, giving people a script or a file to place on their site. They would then come back to SEO Meter to log in and check the results. This would be a lot more accurate method to test the rate and would bring more repeat traffic back to SEO Meter.

Right now I can tell you that Google comes to my site hundreds of times each day but only caches the site once or twice. I’m a lot more interested in the crawl rate than I am in the rate Google is caching my pages.

In my opinion, making this change would make the site more useful and would make it easier to write about it. If the site made the change, I would write about it for free (that’s an open invitation) because I would see it as a service that everyone should use.