I came across this cool tool a few days ago called TouchGraph. Simply type in your domain name or the keyword you are targeting, and let it do its magic. This tool uses the Google “related sites” query and displays a very cool chart. I tested a few out so far and find that they will display a lot of related sites and competitors. This means that you can go visit these sites, and ask the webmaster if you could write and article for them. Its easy to tell who runs the market for the keywords you input by the size of their circle.

When you find a SEO company, most likely they will ask for your domain so they can look over your site and run reports on your content. We ask the question of how and what do they do

When I check a site out this is what I do

1. Check PageRank, the age of the domain, Google/ Yahoo Indexed pages, and Yahoo LinkDomain. I will do this to see how their site has done in the search engines.
   • PageRank and Google’s Indexed Pages. I can determine by the indexed pages how much exposure a site gets, and the PageRank will let me know what Google thinks of the site. If I see that a site has been around since 2003 and has a PageRank of 0, I know this site is doing something very wrong.
   • Analyzing Yahoo LinkDomain will give me a sense of how connected this site is with the community. Do they comment on other blogs. Forums? Do people write about their site?
2. Look at the overall design and source code of the site.
   • Link structure is very important in seo. Let’s use an eCommerce website for this example. Does the link look like this http://mysite.com/productid?=8a72373d6? Or is the link optimized like this http://mysite.com/category/brand-name/product-name. Ensure that the product keyword and brand names are in the link. Google loves this.
   • Do they use the correct tags for images?
   • Are they using proper Meta descriptions and keywords? Do they keyword stuff?
   • How is their source code? Do they properly use <title>,<h1> and <h2> tags? Do they use tables in their design?
   • Does the site pass w3c validation?
3. Do they take advantage of social networking?
   • Does your prospective client use facebook, twitter, digg, suquddo, etc?

These methods won’t take me very long to see. I use one particular firefox extension to assist me with determining some of this information. SEO Quake is a great tool that I use daily to check out websites. You will need HTML knowledge to analyze the source code, and you should look at the company’s name in Google or Yahoo look more into them.

Update: If you want your site checked out by me, leave your domain in the comments box. Its free.