Web Site Maintenance

There’s a few tools at your disposal to make sure your site runs smoothly, and that your site provides the best brand experience. After releasing RIAx to measure rich media applications in May, Avenue A / Razorfish this week released Super-intelligent Link Crawler (SiLC). The tool crawls Web sites to find broken links and 404 error messages. It also analyzes why errors occur, and looks into how your Web site is seen by search engines, and how to improve those results. Avenue A / Razorfish used SiLC in conjunction with SEO and Web design teams to evaluate U.S. News & World Report’s site. The tool determined the site’s articles weren’t being ranked because the Web and print versions registered as duplicates. The two months after the evaluation and relaunch, the site saw 24 percent increase in organic visits, and 45 percent increase in organic visits from Google compared to the previous year.

Accenture’s Marketing Sciences division has a new Web site benchmarking system called Accenture Web Evaluator. The tool analyzes how ell company’s Web sites attract and retain customers, support and reinforce their brand, deliver services, and generate sales. Accenture evaluated over 260 Web sites using nine key factors comprised of 33 criteria based on delivering high-performing, branded customer experiences on the Web. The top sites include Nike, Ford, Google, Adidas, and Microsoft. Those nine factors: search and navigation; information; service; engagement; relationship building; branding; e-commerce; globalization; and number of visitors.

Both tools provide insights, and possibly overlap with existing Web analytics solutions you may already have in place to measure your site. Many of those Web analytics products area also getting updates as the demand for better metrics and site optimization escalates.