One of the most popular free search engine marketing tools is the one providing Website Comparisons. The tool allows you to see how your website ranks, and compares your site against others such as  your competitors.  Here are a few key benchmarks of search engine marketing you should know about from the tool.

Alexa Rank – gives you a general measure of the traffic your website is receiving.  The lower the score the better.  It’s very useful to compare the traffic trend to that of your competitors for example.  If you do any social media marketing, it will play a part in how much traffic you receive from your marketing effort. The SiteInfo of Alexa will also tell you a lot about a particular website, like Traffic Stats, Contact Info, Related Links, Keywords, Clickstream, and Demographics.

Google PageRank – is a numeric value between 0-10 that represents how important a page is on the web. It is based on a link analysis algorithm that is similar to a ballot system. When one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important that page is assumed to be.

Indexed Pages – reports how many pages of your website can be found on Google.  Having more indexed pages indicates that your website is search-engine friendly and is ultimately beneficial to your ranking.   As an example, we’ve seen a large DVD rental website that initially had about 100 pages indexed by Google due to search engine barriers on the site.  With some effort and minor optimization of the website, it went from 100 to over 50,000 indexed pages in less than a month.

Inbound Links – reports how many websites directly link back to your site.  Having a good number of credible links to your website will also boost your Google Page-Rank and improve the importance of your website within Google.  It allows Google and other search engines to position your website higher in their search results.  Of course, the content needs to be related to the search terms.

The Website Comparison tool is just one tool and a start for your online marketing efforts.  You can also try the  Keyword Suggestion Tool to see what search terms people are using to find your website and Webpage Analyzer to get a technical breakdown of key components of a webpage relevant to the search engines.