Website grader gives free tips to improve your blog
No matter what line of business you’re in, it’s vital that you can measure the results of your endeavours. If you spend any amount of time dealing with websites, you’ll understand the importance of statistics, and how they can track progress and provide pointers for improvement.
My good friend and fellow Scottish resident, Chris at Blog-Op, pointed me in the direction of the Website Grader.
Website Grader is a free tool that analyses any web address you enter and gives an almost instant report.
Related keywords
Optionally, you can also enter specific keywords that describe your website. The Website Grader software will then determine how your website ranks for the given keywords.
Another nice feature is the optional addition of competing websites. Rather than analysing your competition individually, you can scan them alongside your own to provide a comparison in the web report.
www.davidairey.com
I’ve used the Website Grader tool a few times, and on the first occassion I received a score of 93 / 100. This score is based upon all the other websites that have been entered into the free software (over 40,000).
After reading through the results and paying attention to the suggestions it made, I ran the test again.
My new score is now 98 / 100.
One interesting thing the Website Grader pointed out was that my domain registration expires within a year. This is what I was informed of:
We would suggest renewing this domain with your registrar. Google and other search engines may penalize websites with domains that are set to expire soon. The reason for this is that many spam sites are often registered for short periods of time.
I also found out that I was missing meta keywords from my web pages, so I fixed that. I’ve read that Google place less emphasis on meta tags as they used to, but I think it’s a good idea to still use them for search engine optimisation (SEO) purposes.
Stepping away from industry buzz words, one very important question to ask yourself for SEO is this: Do you offer quality, relevant content that a member of your target market would find useful?
What score does your website get with the Website Grader?
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27 spot-on reader comments to “Website grader gives free tips to improve your blog”
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I got a 94/100 :) I will check it again after I implement some changes like it suggests.
Wow, I had a 73 and went to a 91. I’m lacking diggs and bookmarks…oh, and I’m on blogger. However, that’s not too shabby, considering.
Really great link, much appreciated.
Very handy tool… I got 84/100 - not bad for a 3-month old (unoptimised) blog! ;)
I might get around to improving that shortly - once I’ve finished the burn-in on my theme reboot!
I got 92 and I didn’t change anything. I got this “You’ll expire soon, harharhar” message, too. I think that’s not important - 280 days will be enough for my provider to automatically renew my domain.
They suggest to ALT-tag every image. Do you really do this?
BTW: BoingBoing got a 99 and this error:
“Stop Words Found In Title! The page title contains one or more words that are considered “noise” by most search engines. Consider removing the following words from the title : A,of”
Nice! I have try it! but, My score is only 78! :(
Arpit, what did the tool suggest you do to improve?
Paul,
I just took a look at your new site design. Such an improvement over the older version! Nice work.
Zep,
I’m not overly concerned about ALT tags and the like. I guess you’re not either? It can be incredibly time-consuming if you pay attention to every tiny detail.
Interesting about Boing Boing. Thanks for that.
Ken,
Again, it was good of you to take part in the Face Behind The Blog.
Cheers David :-)
Alt-tags for images are a useful way of getting a little extra search traffic, and should be used if you care about the accessibility of your website.
Far from compulsory though…
The version of WordPress I’m running makes it very easy to add ALT tags to images, and requests them upon inserting an image into a post.
It wasn’t always like that from what I remember, so I’m sure there are quite a few un-tagged images floating around my archives.
I got 88% — not to shabby for my niche. I think my SEO efforts are the only thing that put me up there, though: using the Sandbox theme, All-In-One SEO plugin and the Google Sitemaps generator plugin.
That’s a really cool tool, David. Thanks.
David - I see you did some more tweaking this weekend! I love the div between the posts and the new photo in the right hand corner.
Have a great week!
I’m sure your clean site design helps a great deal. I’ve experimented with Sandbox, but didn’t have the time it needs to create something like yours.
The sitemap generator plugin is a great one!
Char,
Thanks for the compliments. I’ve decided to add a photo for a more personable feel to my site. It seems that more and more of the blogs I read regularly are making use of them, yours included.
Have a great week too!
Wow, thats a great score David!
I got a pretty abysmal 55. Ok, my blog is less than a week old, but I still hoped to be higher. I’m going to look into the suggestions and see where it goes from there. Its a really useful web tool.
The tweaked layout does look tidier. Photos are getting pretty popular on blogs, and it’s something I’ve planned on doing when I get a more photogenic shot. I’ll get around to that eventually…
Less than a week old? Give it six months and I’d be very interested to see what your feed count is.
Thanks for the layout tweak feedback. I do think the photo addition makes it more friendly.
That’s a nice tool, I got a score of 90/100. hehe my tagline contains many “noisy” words: how,to,and,make,it, will have to check that, but if boingboing has noise, I don’t mind having a noisy tagline :)
Very nice resource, David! Bookmarked you and the grader, too.
my blog received 92/100. I got two warnings - domain expires in less than a year and too many (18 vs. 10) meta keywords.
Thanks for the link, bookmarked it for future tests :-)
I only got a 64: stop words found in title, no keywords in meta-data, domain expires in less than a year, page description not found, etc. Guess I have some work to do! =) Thanks for posting that, I had never heard of it before.
If it’s fine by Boing Boing then it’s fine by me. I don’t subscribe to that site but I know of its huge popularity.
Leslie, Vivien, Sera,
You’re all very welcome. I’m glad this post was of interest.
An interesting concept for evaluating sites but I think it is important not to get too hung up on the grade.
I plugged in a few of the sites I have done and one of my best performing site in terms of a google ranking and sheer number of visits got a pathetic score of 31.
This particular site has maintained a top 5 position for 6 years keyword counterfeit and because of this I don’t want to “mess” with the code and implement any of the recomendations webgrader makes.
My site has a score of 88
This tool was extremely useful for me. I had discovered it several weeks ago and graded my site. I had an 81. With a little bit of work, I brought it up to a 92 in about two hours. Since I’m not very technologically advanced and am a newcomer to blogging, I was delighted to get that help!
I agree that it’s important not to get hung up about grade. It’s a nice indicator though, and flagged up one or two things I’m glad I found out.
Sujan,
Thanks for the visit.
Shelly,
That’s great that you found some use from the tool already.
97%. I need to fix my meta keywords.
Web Statistics are definitely very important for an online business.
Website Grader seems to be good, thanks for the info.
I have been using GoStats.com for web analytics and they are professional with a comprehensive visitor log.
Oh yeah 95/100 on my first go! Thanks for the link, it attests that my SEO tweaks are working well.
Argh lol. I shouldn’t have done this ;)
56/100 that’s what you get from moving to a new domain ;) Oh well at least the poor summer weather will be good for something.
Dennis, no doubt your new domain has had an effect.
I think you’ve made a good move though. Better now than another few months down the line eh?