So far my project is coming along slowly but surely.
The person whose website I will be checking for the ranking is out until later this week so I decided to focus on my comparison report. In my effort to understand more about SEO, I decided instead of comparing the two mapping websites, I will compare City Tech and BMCC. It makes sense to use a site that I know rather than a random site. First of all, after opening up both websites, I will say that BMCC definitely looks more inviting. When trying to create traffic to a website, it is important to look nice. You really don’t need to spend a lot of money, just having intrinsic appeal matters as much if not more. And in reality, SEO is an ongoing effort that the more you do the better you become at it.
I decided to use the Side-by-Side SEO Comparison Tool by Internet Marketing Ninjas. This is a site that checks all links and images on a page and it compares two sites in a side-by-side report. At a glance, you can see how your page and a competitor’s page use keywords, how much text is on the page, and which keywords are used. This is invaluable competitive intelligence for SEOs. Below is a breakdown of the components:
- On-page analysis: Shows the number of words used on the page, including linked and unlinked text, as well as the number of links and page size.
- Metadata tool: Displays text in the title tag, meta description and meta keywords tags
- Headings: Displays text used in <h1> and <h2> tags
- Keyword density tool: Reveals statistics for non-linked content
- Link structure tool: Displays the number and types of links used for internal, subdomain, and external links
- Page text tool: Shows both the total text and specific, non-linked text found on the pages
- Source code tool: Provides quick access to on-page HTML code
The first comparison I ran was an on-page analysis. By entering the two URLs, I saw that CityTech had 163 words on the page and BMCC had 607. My take on this is that the more words on a page, the more chance of that page being found. Therefore, the more content on a page, the better the ranking. The more links a web page has, the higher it will typically rank on search engines. City Tech has 63 link words compared to BMCC which has 401. The biggest difference I noticed was that City Tech’s page size is 16,205 and BMCC’s page size is 54,156. However, I am not sure if the page size really matters although BMCC uses more of their page and it looks better.
So then I compared the head tag elements. The head tag contains the title tag and it’s important to the spiders or web crawlers. These are programs run by search engines to build a summary of a website’s content. They take web page content and create key search words for online users to use. In comparison, they are pretty similar so not much to discuss there.
The most interesting comparisons I found was the different in the amount to keywords used. I noticed that BMCC more than doubled the amount of keywords used than City Tech. It is good to use keywords but over stuffing too many keywords is not good either because it could send an alert which can negatively affect a ranking. I also noticed that City Tech has links to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkdIn, Instagram, and BMCC has links to all of them but they also a blog page that is linked to their first page.
So Monday, I logged onto dot.tk and attempted to create a free web page. I was directed to go the 2freehosting to create a domain and will find out tomorrow, Tuesday, to see if it worked.
After trying unsuccessfully to complete the free web page via dot.tk, I decided to create a WordPress account.
Wish me luck!
My next step will be to continue to develop my WordPress blog using keywords and headings to optimize the site and also a larger comparison of CUNY sites.
