Website Grader takes a URL and an email address, and optionally, related keywords and competing websites, and generates a report on how effectively the site is using common search engine marketing strategies. The report includes the following:

• Website Grade: a percentile score against all other websites submitted to Website Grader.
• Google stats: Google Page Rank, number of Google Inbound Links, approximate number of Google Indexed Pages, and the date of the last Google crawl.
• Web Page Structure: how the site is structured, including title, descriptions, Meta-Keywords, Headings, and images, and offers suggestions for improvement
• Stats for other search engines and social bookmarking sites: Alexa Rank, Technorati Rank, Yahoo! Inbound Links, del.icio.us Saved Count, and number of Digg's.
• Search rankings for target keywords, if provided.
• Comparison to competing websites, if provided.

Website Grader was developed by HubSpot Software, which also provides Search Engine Marketing consulting services (and so, Website Grader, in addition to being a useful tool for us, is also a clever marketing tool for them). Their website provides free articles on Search Engine Marketing that are useful introductions to the basics:

Improving Search Engine Rank is a guide for more effectively using keywords.

Social Bookmarking Marketing presents a number of tips for optimizing your content for getting more links from social bookmarking sites

Detailed Keyword Tips provides advice for choosing the best keywords to use, and provides links to tools to help pick the best ones.

Link Building for SEO emphasizes the importance of having inbound links for getting a higher pagerank score, and gives general tips on how to get them.


Note: Google provides a pretty comprehensive suite of free tools for Search Engine Optimization and Marketing:

Google Keyword Tool is a free tool for choosing keywords.

Google Analytics, of course, is a popular tool for analyzing your web traffic.

Google Webmaster Tools enables you to see how google crawls and indexes your site, provide all of your pages to Google Index through Google Sitemaps, and get statistics on how you rank for searches.

Google's Conversion University offers free articles on Search Engine Optimization and Marketing, divided into the following topics: Driving Traffic, Converting Visitors, Tracking and Testing, and Analytics in Context