I came across this site, Website Grader, which, well, attempts to grade a site giving it a score from 0-100%. I didn’t expect much to begin with, but decided to go ahead and see how one of the sites I was interested in did.

The system lets you enter a site’s URL, keywords you think are relevant, but also a site that you consider a competitor (which I thought was very useful). It takes a short while to generate the report since the tool queries various sources for information about the site in question (Google, Yahoo, Alexa, digg, Del.icio.us and so on). In the end a report is presented consisting of the following information:

• Google Page Rank (OK, interesting to know it, but not really a major indicator, just one of more than a hundred factors)
• web page structure (depending on the site, useful recommendations may be found in this section; the site I tested seemed to have too many keywords in the keywords meta tag, although the report clearly said this tag has pretty much no meaning for ranking, it did recommend a smaller number of keywords; also, there seemed to be tags on the page, which the tool recommends be replaced by proper CSS directives; OK this was useful)
• Domain info (nothing shown, but if there was something I would have seen the registrar, registration date, domain age, expiry date; this is subject to registration privacy settings I suppose, so didn’t expect to see too much here)
• Heading summary (no headings found; tool further explains headings are good to have on a page to enable easier understanding by visitors; OK, this is sound advice, although headings are easily replaced by similar CSS directives, so from an SEO standpoint headings might be good, but only if used properly/moderately)
• Image summary (I think this is pretty self-explanatory; lists image load requests on the page)
• Google indexed pages (this is pretty clear)
• Google crawl date (if recent and frequent means your site is updated over time which is good because it is deemed current and growing)
• Conversion methods (the tool recommended the use of RSS feeds for better conversion; RSS feeds are questionably convertible so this advice is under a question mark, but ok doesn’t hurt to try if nor already implemented)
• Inbound links (shows inbound links from Google and Yahoo; Google link count is not very useful because it simply isn’t accurate - the only way is to query Webmaster tools, but you already knew that right? Besides, even this is not 100% accurate, just gives an idea; Yahoo link count is perhaps deemed as more accurate, but also should be taken as a relative indicator, not as an absolute)
• Technorati ranking & Delicious bookmarks (are you using social bookmarking as means of getting traffic worthy links?)
• Alexa traffic ranking (this is not very useful; the whole concept of how Alexa works makes it very questionable in terms of analytical value so shouldn’t be taken too seriously; this is just an indicator of whether the site is continuously updated; if you add new content every day, your Alexa traffic rank will shrink (less is better) over time; of course you’d have to actually be getting at least some visitors at the same time, or it won’t work)
• Readability level (I guess this may be important from a usability POV, but not so much for SEO)