Feb 14, 2011
Does your blog make the grade?
So you’ve started your blog, you are getting traffic and people are engaging with you by leaving comments, tweeting about you and posting about you on social media sites.
You have also begun to litter the web with your website URL so the search engines can track links back to your site.
You are checking Google analytics to see how your traffic is growing, where people are coming from, what they are interested in, how loyal they are and how deeply they search your site.
Which is fantastic, but how do you know what your performance is like compared to other blogs?
Perhaps one of the most satisfying blogging tools I have found is website grader by HubSpot. Amazingly this is a free service and they have some other cool resources for bloggers too.
Click on the website grader link above, enter your website, add your competitors’ URLs and leave your email. Click ‘Generate report’, sit back for a couple of minutes and ‘voila’ you have some really useful benchmarking information about your site.
Unfortunately it only grades you against people who have already graded their site (only 3,263,768 so far!) but you get a very good idea about how your blog is doing and how you can improve it. Don’t get too hung up on the numbers – sometimes it doesn’t pick up all the data, but you can see the overall trend.
I just checked mine and found my sitemap wasn’t working. Fixed it and I went from 51 to 61. Small things really do matter for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
NewsFlash: I have recently checked my site and am now graded at 91!
26 March 2011
What do you get?
1. Website grade – see badge above.
2. Website Traffic
3. SEO information
4. Social Media ranking
5. MOZ rank (similar to Google ranking)
6. Conversion forms (Have you got RSS and newsletter sign up for instance)
7. Readability level – education level of writing
Plus a lot more. So I suggest you whizz over to website grader now and see how your site measures up. And don’t panic if you have a low score – it doesn’t take a great deal of effort to raise the bar and often it is just a matter of time before you start to race ahead of the pack.
When you do get your website graded let me know your score and what you learnt from the exercise?
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