Does Your Website Make the Grade in SEO?

Posted by Heidi on September 12th, 2009

After a meeting of the Florida Speakers Association, I was reminded of a great tool that shows you how well your website functions in the search engines, what your visitors look for, what they might be typing into the search engines to find you and much more. It is HubSpot’s Website Grader an online tool that helps you check your site SEO (search engine optimization, rankings and so forth).

Here are the things Website Grader “grades” websites on (what I really like is that Website Grader offers suggestions for optimizing the site and improving rankings):

On-Page SEO ~ this is the process of putting the right keywords in the right places. The report gives the Metadata results which includes Page title, meta description and meta keywords. The report also tells you if information is missing which gives the web owner more opportunities to “correct” those pages.

In addition it talks about Headings. Here’s what it says “Similar to how newspapers and magazines use headings and sub-headings to help readers, websites can use special tags in their HTML. These tags not only help human readers read the content, they also help search engine spiders better understand the content on a page and what is most important.”

In the Image summary it shows how many were found, if ALT Text is used on the images and where. Since spiders cannot crawl images, using ALT Text on images makes it easy for those spiders to “read” the text of the image to know what it is.

Website Grader grades interior pages as well, letting you know what, if anything is missing. If you don’t have keywords or a description for certain pages, it will show up here. Keep in mind they only grade 3 or maybe 4 pages so you will have to go back in and see that these two important components are filled in.

Your site is graded on “readability” which means it measures the approximate education level to which you are writing. It is suggested that the content be “simple so that a majority of the target audience can understand it.”

You are graded on Off-Page SEO which is includes all the things you do to promote your website beyond the design. This includes number of inbound links to your site, relevant directory registrations, such as Yahoo, DMoz and Google and getting more pages indexed in the search engines.

You are graded on the age of your blog as well as expiration date (or renewal date) of domain registration.

You are graded on your Google page rank (generally 1-10) with 10 being the best. It will also tell you what your Google page rank is.

Website Grader tells you how many pages have been indexed with Google and the last date Google crawled the site.

You are graded on your Alexa ranking – the ranking of your site in comparison to all the others in the world.

If your site has a blog you are given “extra credit” and if your blog is ranked by Technorati all the better.

It shows the last 3 articles published and if the have been listed on “Digg” including the number of diggs the post received.

Website Grader looks for an Rss Feed and some sort of conversion mechanism (such as a sign up form).

You are given a grade for the types of keywords used and their relevance as well as your overall score summary.

I strongly recommend every website and blog owner use Website Grader and check your grade periodically to see where you are improving and where there are opportunities for improvement. I know I am going to start doing this at least weekly.

To learn more about optimizing your site, check out the Internet Marketing Kit by Website Grader

And be sure to read my article, Why, Where and How to Advertise your Business Online for links to valuable online directories.

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Debbie Stevens said,

September 13, 2009 @ 4:59 am

Thanks so MUCH Heidi, this article was so helpful and I’ve already tested my website using their ‘grader’!
Was pleasantly surprised by the results, and am now taking good advice on some things that need doing….I highly recommend this tool to others, absolutely brilliant.

Cheers!

Heidi Richards Mooney said,

September 13, 2009 @ 5:14 pm

Debbie,

So glad it was helpful. I agree that this tool can make such a difference in positioning as wall as optimizing our websites. I too found it enlightening and have made several changes based upon my own results.

thanks for stopping by!

Heidi

Eileen Williams said,

September 14, 2009 @ 6:33 pm

This was such a helpful post–THANK YOU!!!
I just ran a report on my site, Feisty Side of Fifty, and was pleased to learn the results. However, as you suggest, I’ll be returning to Website Grader frequently to keep abreast of how my site is doing and to learn great ways to boost my score. As Debbie said, this one is absolutely brilliant!

Debbie Stevens said,

September 15, 2009 @ 4:37 am

I’m hooked, it is already giving me pointers towards the best search engines, better meta tags etc etc…Like Eileen, will continue to stay updated with use of the grader, am now displaying my results courtesy of their button!