Website Grader: One-Stop Search Engine Optimization Analysis
Website Grader is a free search engine optimization tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of your website.
Provided by Hubspot, the service looks at over 50 factors and provides you with a score that ranks your site alongside all of the other sites it has assessed.
Just input your website’s address and (optionally) a few keywords for your site and/or competitors’ web addresses, and the site spits churns out a report packed with useful tips for improving the marketing of your site.
Analyzing Your Site
Website Grader looks at six broad areas:
- On-page SEO – metadata, keywords, images, readability, interior pages
- Off-page SEO – inbound links, Google PageRank, domain info, traffic, relevant directory services, indexed pages
- Blogosphere – whether you have a blog, how it ranks on Technorati, recent blog posts
- Social Mediasphere – limited to del.icio.us and digg
- Converting visitors to leads – do you have an RSS feed and conversion form?
- Competitive intelligence – how well you rank and how you shape up compared to your competitors
How This Site Measures Up
I ran the report twice, three weeks apart, to compare the results. I was pleased to see that my score rose from 85% to 92% over that time, meaning this site ranks higher than 92% of the sites Website Grader has looked at.
I still have a bit of work to do:
- I need to insert meta keywords into my template
- I need to remember to use alt tags on all my images
- My domain name registration will expire in six months; renewing it would be a good idea
- My Google PageRank could use a boot up the rear end
- The site isn’t listed on any third-party directories.
Conclusion
Website Grader is a very useful tool. It’s not comprehensive by any means (the social media section in particular is far from complete) but it provides an excellent top-level analysis of your site that, combined with other tools, can help you to improve your site’s visibility.
Of course, none of this is any use if you don’t provide good content for your visitors.
How does your site measure up? What could you tweak to make your content more visible?
