Optimise Your Website with NLYZR.com

“You don’t have to run faster than the bear, just faster than your slowest friend”

When I first started building websites, the web was a very loosely joined collection of sites, boards, pages and applications. It was hard work finding what was “out there” – and we all spent a great deal of time finding, collecting and curating lists of sites and bookmarks. And then along came Google and everything changed.

Suddenly you could search and find what you wanted.

Google’s search results were powered by a complex mathematical logarithm that calculated the number of other websites linking to each other, analysed the text on the page and the images that were shown – along with dozens of other criteria – and then sorted this list of websites into an easily navigable list. And in our impatient, time poor world, those websites that ranked highly – on the first couple of pages – received the bulk of search related traffic.

But just as the web became easier to search, it also became easier to create. With cheap or free blogging and content management systems, you can have a website up and running in minutes. Literally.

But having a website doesn’t guarantee traffic. Remember, there are millions of sites out there. The challenge is finding the time to not only update your website, but to optimise it so that it can be easily found by your customers.

The thing to remember about search rankings is that it’s like the quote above – you don’t have to rank #1, you just have to outrank your competitors.

The team at Newcastle digital agency, Sticky, have recently launched a tool – NLYZR – that helps you do just that.

This web based tool has been under development for over two years. I remember being excited to see a very early – and very manual – version some time ago. Back then, Sticky founder, Craig Wilson, knew he was onto something special, but has invested a great deal of intellectual and practical knowledge into the system. From the beginning the vision was to automate as much as possible – so that business owners and web masters could easily and quickly see improvements.

These days, you simply put your website address into the NLYZR site together with preferred search keywords and the system comes back with a ranking and some recommendations. From there you can change, tweak and update your site to improve your search results.

The thing I like is that it provides practical suggestions – like reducing the length of the titles in your blog posts or adding descriptions to the images on your website. And that’s just the free version. Those who want to dig deeper and optimise an entire website can subscribe to the service from as little as $149 per year. It may be just what your business needs.