Saturday, April 17, 2010

Free Website Grader and Tips on Improving Your Blog

I am constantly looking for ways to improve my blog. Whether it be navigation, ability to read and understand, increasing search engine optimization or something else, I know there is always room for improvement.

Hubspot has a nifty little tool known as the Website Grader. Anyone can use it and it couldn't be any easier. You simply type your blog or website address then wait a few seconds for Hubspot to retrieve the data. I use Hubspot's Website Grader at least once a week.

Website Grader checks your blog for the following 5 key components:

1.) Create Content - "Every web page has the potential to rank well in search engines and draw traffic from other sources, like social media sites and the blogosphere. Of course, whether a page draws traffic (and links) depends on whether it's optimized and how remarkable (useful, interesting, etc.) it is. But in general, most pages do "ok" and contribute to the cause, so it's both a quality and a quantity game."

  • Blog Analysis - Shows whether or not your blog has been found and lists the date of your last blog post.
  • Blog Grade - Blog Grader is a free tool developed by HubSpot, similar to Website Grader but specifically for blogs. This is based on the measurement of traffic levels to your blog and the number and quality of links pointing at it.
  • Recent Blog Articles - Shows the last 3 links, or blog posts. Also provides the number of times that post has been re-tweeted and if there are any inbound links to that specific post.
  • Google Indexed Pages - The Google web crawler will visit your blog periodically and look for new content for its index. Generally, the more pages your site has within the Google cache, the better. Google Indexed Pages shows the number of indexed pages your blog has.
  • Readability Level - This score measures the approximate level of education necessary to read and understand the web page content. You will see something similar to primary/elementary school, High school, Masters Degree, ect.
2.) Optimize - "Optimizing that content is a key step, however, to ensure you give your valuable content the best chance possible of drawing traffic from the web. In essence, this section is about maximizing your ROC - return on content."

  • Metadata - Metadata tags allow you to tell the search engines what your web page is about.
  • Heading Summary - Provides you with the number of headings found on your blog.
  • Image Summary - Shows the number of images found on your blog and tells you the amount of images that do not contain ALT test.
  • Interior Page Analysis - Shows any interior pages and whether or not you have included a description for the interior pages.
  • Domain Info - Unless you have purchased a domain name, the domain that will show is blogspot. If you have purchased a domain, it will include the date your domain expires. "Most experts agree that you should register your domain for a long time, because search engines factor domain "stability" when looking at your pages."
  • MOZ Rank - MozRank is SEOmoz's general, logarithmically scaled 10-point measure of global link authority or popularity. and is very similar in purpose to the measures of link importance used by the search engines (e.g., GOOGLE's PageRank).
  • Last Google Crawl Date - Google will periodically crawl websites looking for new and updated content. This will show you the last date and time that a Google Bot visited your blog.
  • Inbound Links - One of the most important measures for a website is how many other sites link to it. This section will display the number of sites linking to your site.
  • Yahoo Directory - This shows either "Found" or "Not Found" in the Yahoo Directory. Note - If you do not have a custom domain, it will automatically show "Found" for Blogspot.
3.) Promote - Shows the following places your blog/content has been found:

  • del.icio.us bookmarks
  • Link Tweet Summary (TweetMeme)
  • Twitter Grade
4.) Convert - Shows whether or not your RSS has been found and displays the RSS link. In this portion, you will also be able to find out whether or not a conversion form(s) has been detected.

5.) Analyze- Check out how you compare to other similar websites.

  • Traffic Rank - Displays your rank as determined by Alexa.
  • Score Summary - Gives a breakdown of your blog score based on the above ranking methods.

I know this seems like a lot, but it is actually very simple. When you key in your website's URL, you will see a badge with your website grade. You will have the option to add your badge to your website using an HTML code, which is provided to you. The rest is just a breakdown of the area's in which your blog is graded. I haven't posted by badge to my blog, as I am trying to reach a 100. Here is what the badge will look like:


The Website Grade for http://www.reviewretreat.com/!

4 comments:

  1. Oh nice! Thanks for this...awesome tool! Gonna check my grade now! ;)

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  2. Thanks for sharing this! My blog got a 70.

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  3. Mine got a 72, but some of the things that it suggested I am not ready for and I like my pics on my site. So at least for now I will deal. By the way I am following you and thanks for the follow

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  4. Wow! I love getting tips like this, thanks for sharing.

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