How To Uncover Any Website's Value In Seconds

More video goodness this week - for your viewing pleasure, a demonstration of the free Website Database editor in Really Useful Web Apps. Run VT ....

Transcript

In this video, I'm going to show you how to find out how influential any website is, using one of the new tools in our software package, Really Useful Web Apps. Best of all, everything I'm going to show you in this video is free.

So to demonstrate this, I'm going to use a new file type we've added support for in the software, which is called a Website Database; and what this does is allow you to store a list of web pages or URL's if you prefer, and then run analysis on them to find out how well those pages perform, in terms of their search engine ranking, inbound links and social media.

There are so many uses for this - you can use this to monitor competitors, monitor the performance of your own websites or web pages, and use it to evaluate link building partners to increase your search engine rankings.

Creating A Website Database

So, to create a Website Database file, you'll first need to open or create a new project within Really Useful Web Apps. Projects allow you to work with various different types file within the software, of which Website Databases are just one.

To Add the new file, right click the root of the project or any folder you have within it, and select Add File.

Select miscellaneous, then Website Database, and give your new file a name. Click Add, and your file will be created and open up in the Website Database Editor.

This is obviously empty because I've just created it, so to start, let's add a web page by clicking the first icon, add url. If you enter a URL for a webpage, then click download details, the page will download and automatically fill in the title and description for you, if they are available on the page. Click OK to return to the list.

Adding a URL

To get statistics for the page, right click it and select "get statistics for selected website". This will set off a bunch of queries to retrieve statistical information from various services across the web. As each finishes you'll see the results appear, you can cancel the remaining statistics queries by clicking on the red cross at the top right. You may need to use that if you run these queries on a lot of different sites you add at the same time, which I'll show you how to do later.

Statistics

Hover your mouse over the heading on each column to see what each column is, in order, you can see the site's Google Page Rank, it's rank on Alexa, and inbound links to the page as counted by Google, Yahoo and Bing. These columns may not populate with any results, which means no links were found to the page on the given search engine. Moving across, you can see sharing statistics from Social Media websites - Facebook shares, Twitter re-tweets, Delicious saves for the url and all Delicious saves for the primary domain. Stumbleupon, Google Buzz and Digg counts follow that.

If the url has an RSS feed, that will appear here, and if that RSS feed is hosted on feedburner, you'll see the number of subscribers if the website has chosen to share subscriber count details on feedburner.

Right of RSS, You can see traffic estimates from Compete.com, the first column shows Compete's estimation of how many visitors the site gets per month along with an icon that indicates whether that's a little or a lot of traffic, and right of that is Compete's traffic ranking for the site, which is similar to Alexa, and the icon shows whether Compete considers this a trustworthy site. Clicking on the links in either of these columns will take you to the full statisitics page on Compete.com which shows a lot more information you may want to look at.

Lastly, you can see the age of the domain and the description you entered at the begining.

Configuring Columns

Now, this is obviously a lot of information to display on screen so if you're more interested in certain statistics over others, you can drag the column headers to reorder them as you wish, and the order you leave these columns in will be preserved when you save the file and reopen it next time.

Additionally, if you're not interested in some of this information, you can disable each of the statistics by right clicking the header here and unchecking the column you don't want to see. This will hide the column, and stop the statistic being retrieved when you run the update function, so if you turn each column you don't want off BEFORE you run the update checks, the hidden columns won't be retrieved. You can turn all the columns back on by selecting "Show All," andthen you'll need to re-run the statistics update if you want to retrieve the missing statistics you had turned off. Like the order of the columns, which ones you have enabled will be preserved in your file for the next time you open it.

Toolbar Options

In the toolbar, there are a couple of options for importing url's in bulk, the first of which is the Import URL button, which lets you simply paste a list of url's, one per line in the textbox and each will be added to a separate line.

To analyse these in bulk, simply click and drag on the rows of the URL's you've added to select them, then right click the selection and click "Get statistics" again, and the analysis will run for every url you've selected. This will obviously take some time to run for each site, so you may decide to cancel all the remaining queries using that cancel button I mentioned earlier.

You can delete any of the url's by right clicking and deleting a row, or making a selection again and deleting in bulk.

Search Engine Results Analysis

Now, let's say you're trying to build backlinks and you want to uncover these kind of statistics for websites that rank well for a given keyword, in order to ascertain how approachable they may be for a link building campaign.

So, if I head over to Google and do a search on say ... "Hign Definition cameras," ... I'll get a bunch of results that rank well for that term.

Now to import that list of results into the Website Database, what I can do is actually import all the links on the page by copying the URL of the Google Search Results, swithc back to Really USeful Web Apps, and then select the "Download Links from Web Page" option in the toolbar. Paste the URL in and the software will download the page again, and extract every link on the page.

Partial Delete

Now the problem with this is that a lot of the links on the page are Google's own internal links to other pages on their site, so to get rid of them, what I can do is hit CTRL + A to select all the URL's, then right click and choose "Delete (filtered)" what this will let you do is delete all the url's in your selection that match the text you type in.

So, I'll type in google.com to get rid of the google links, and I can see I'll need to do it again on webcache.google, .... and youtube.com to clean the list up. What I'm now left with is all the search results, and I can run the statistics queries over all these URL's so see how well each of these compare in terms of inbound links, page rank, social media etcetera.

You'll find other uses for this "download links" feature on pages that contain hundreds of links, where you may want to quickly analyse all of them without manually copying and pasting each link.

Similiar to Download links from Web Page, there's a "Download links from RSS Feed" which will download an RSS feed url and import all the links in the feed.

Sorting

Once the statistics queries are complete, you can sort the url's by any of the different columns to see which ones rank higher than others, and if you save these results and open them at a later date, you can simply select them all again and update the statistics to see how each site's performance changes over time.

This is really useful if you're analysing your competitors on the web, and want to track how well their websites are performing over time alongside your own, or evaluating the performance of your own webpages alongside any SEO and promotional activities you are doing to monitor the results for yourself, or your clients.

Adaptive Mutation

You'll notice when you right click on a site or selection of sites that a number of options appear, and beyond the first few obvious ones, what you'll see at the bottom of this menu is a whole bunch of different features that will change depending on what other applets you've got installed in Really Useful Web Apps.

We call this adaptive mutation, and what that means is that whenever you download a new free, or premium applet from our App Store into the software, it has the capability to extend the features of existing applets.

So to explain that a little more clearly, you'll see this option to Bookmark the url on delicious, and that's appearing BECAUSE i've also installed the Delicious Browser applet in the software. The other options available there are all introduced based on the different applets I've got installed, so the power of this tool just grows and grows every time you add other applets to other software - and you can see I can do things like a WHOIS lookup to find out who owns the domain, view the page in a text web browser which will show me what search engines index on the page, and see the most popular pages on this domain via Diig.com

You can create and save multiple website databases, allowing you to separate lists of websites based on what you're working on. For instance, I maintain separate databases of web pages that review my competitor's products for each product category I compete in, so I can then evaluate those review sites to decide whether to try and contact them about my products.

You can also export all these results to CSV using the toolbar option, which means you can open these statistics in Excel to do further work on.

Summary

So that's the Website Database editor, you'll find it in the free standard edition of Really Useful Web Apps which you can download at www.reallyusefulwebapps.com.

Hopefully you can now see how useful this is in terms of evaluating your own websites, competitors, link partners and any other type of website you need to work with - there's really nothing this tool can't tell you about a website in terms of it's traffic, popularity, rankings and social media reach.

I've got a bunch of cool upgrades planned for this tool along with a premium version so subscribe to my Twitter, Facebook or YouTube channels for updates, and subscribe to the RSS feed and email list on the main site for details on special offers and other exclusives.