Website Grader is a free SEO tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO [Search Engine Optimization], social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.
I like to run my blog through Grader every few weeks. This site will give you an overall grade (Bookish Ruth is currently graded at 97.3 out of 100), show you your Google Page Rank (Mine is 4 of 10), tell you the last time Google crawled your site, show your Technorati rating and offer suggestions for how you can improve your search engine traffic. I added meta tags to my blog after my first report suggested that I do so, and have seen my search engine traffic improve drastically. (Edit: A lot of folks have asked about this, so here is a good explanation of how to create meta tags for Blogger. Here is a tutorial for meta tags for Wordpress.)
To participate in this challenge and be eligible for prizes:
1. Run your blog through Website Grader: http://website.grader.com/
2. Leave a comment on this post. Did anything in your report surprise you? What sort of improvements, if any, will you be making to your blog?
3. To be eligible for the Bloggiesta giveaways, please include an e-mail address with your comment.
Don't forget the other mini-challenges:
80 comments:
I'm not able to participate in Bloggiesta but I just wanted to stop in and say the Web Grader site really helped me know what I needed to do to improve my site's grade! It's a great tool! Hope everyone has fun with Bloggiesta this weekend, that's such a great idea! I'll probably be implementing some tips I learn on my own :-)
Can you add meta tags in blogspot?
Ouch: "Readability Level: Primary / Elementary School" I wasn't expecting that. Too many quick bicycle blurbs I guess.
@Lenore: yes, you can. Click on customize and blogspot will give you the template area, but from there, click on the "Edit HTML" link.
That was an interesting exercise. At the risk of sounding ignorant, how do you add meta tags?
I just discovered I had much much more people reading via bloglines than I thought. Thanks!
Thanks for a great challenge! I heart Website Grader, I really do!
Cool site! Thanks! (I also don't know about the metatags but assume I can't do it since I don't have access to the software.)
Thanks for the website!
I have a 78% score. Much higher than I expected! "This blog currently has a Technorati rank of 376,090, which puts it in the top 0.54% of blogs tracked by Technorati." *squeals*
@AbbotOfUnreason: Having that level of readability is great! It means that it's easy to understand.
Happy with my score 98.9. I need to add my site to the DMOZ directory and some other things to increase, but overall I'm happy.
3m.michelle att gmail.com
I'm not really sure what a meta tag is?
Does anybody know how to add it to wordpress?
That was a fun challenge. My score was 78% which was higher than I would imagine considering I don't try to hard to market my own website. I also liked finding out the Google information. I'll have to start checking it more often.
Thanks again.
blondierocket@gmail.com
How fun. I've never heard of Website Grader, so this was really helpful and interesting to me. Thank you! I'm still trying to figure out what it all means. I might look into adding alt text to some of my images, or possibly resizing images, because W.G. says I have too many. I'm surprised the Alexa info says it's in the top 11% of traffic for websites (unless they mean blogspot is, hmm). Sometimes it feels like I'm just talking to myself. :) I'm going to look into listing the blog with Technorati, since the report pointed out that I'm not listed there. Thanks again for the great advice!
It said that I had too many images and that I should change that so that the page would load faster. I'll have to resize dome images and get rid of those I don't use anymore.
@AbbotOfUnreason: I too had the Primary Level, but it's good thing according to the site:
In most cases, the content should be made to be simple so that a majority of the target audience can understand it.
Ok, I'm seriously considering moving my blog to WordPress. I read this article:
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/46/Why-Your-Business-Blog-Shouldn-t-Be-On-BlogSpot-com.aspx
and I agree with most of what it's said here.
My dad has a site for his radio show, on WordPress platform, and warned me when I told him I'd be using a Blogger Platform.
So what should I do?
Maybe create an account to try out WP?
Any help will be welcomed!
ella_press (at) live.com.ar
My score was 49%-not terribly surprising since I'll admit to neglecting my blogspot blog. I'll run the Website grader again at the end of the weekend after I've made some improvements to my site. Great tool.
My addy: kitty fischer at gmail dot com
Thanks so much for this challenge - I had never heard of this site so as a new blog, this is perfect to see what I need to work on. And now I have a few more things to add to the list.
My score was 67. Woot! Much higher than expected. I am stoked. Well, I should register with Technorati and get those meta tags thingies.
I hadn't thought of my blog as a business, but I know nothing about Wordpress. Yet some things about Blogger bug me. What to do, what to do. I think I'll stick with Blogger for now. Thanks for the mini-challenge.
My blog has a grade of 87%, which seems pretty good to me! My Technorati rank is higher than I thought it was, too. I have a few tweaks I should probably make, mostly related to images and metadata (which I'm not sure I grasp), but overall it doesn't look bad. I'll try to remember to do this every couple of months to check my progress.
Great Mimi-challenge. I was pleased with a grade of 81 and will word on all the suggestions in the report. Thanks!
gvngrn@earthlink.net
I scored a 79%, which made me happy. I thought it would be much lower. I may add my blog to a few of the sites it recommended. Although, I was pleasantly surprised to see my traffic rank was much higher than I would have ever imagined.
bookblather(at)gmail(dot)com
BTW, because book bloggers use a lot of images for book covers, I would ignore the advice on using to many images. And if anybody needs to twitter me or anything about how to add meta tags into a WordPress blog, I know how, so just let me know.
I was 302,237 of the 1,039,825 blogs
I was a 71/100 which is better than I thought
Readability Primary Elementary level.
I have no rank by google so I have to figure out to change that.
174 pages in the Google index
Traffic Rate in the to 14.72 % which is good for 3 months of serious blogging and networking
I have 641 inbound links.
My email address is Shannanusar(at)aol(dot)com
My blog has a rating of 83, which is better than I expected! I love this website, I will use it again for sure. I'm still trying to understand the "meta" thing, though?
As for Technocrati, I registered but then there was a problem and its unable to claim my blog. I'll try again later! :)
infiniteshelf at gmail dot com
This was really interesting I didn't even know there was such a thing. I had a score of 98.9, which was a lot higher than I was expecting. Definitley found some things I can add, that I had no idea about. Such as the Meta Tags, the bookmarking and digg, and some of the bigger names directories. Thanks for this!
thestorysiren(at)hotmail(dot)com
I received an 88% - which was a wonderful surprise! I need to add meta-tags and keywords for improvement. I will use smaller images and add alt-text to them. I have a Google PageRank of 4 and will think of getting my own domain name so that it shows up instead of "blogspot". I will also find out how to add email subscriptions!
I scored 79% as well. I'm happy with that since my blog is relatively new, but I still think I could get closer to 90%. I'm doing better in some areas than I thought and worse in some that I would have thought otherwise. The best parts: My blog rank is very high and I have tons more readers than I previously thought. I really need to work on my Google Page Rank though.
jax1204@gmail(dot)com
I'd never heard of this site before. And it was a pleasant surprise that Becky's Book Reviews earned a 99 :) I also tested my other two sites, Young Readers, (92) and Operation Actually Read Bible (87). The reports showed that I needed meta tags on all my blogs. It also recommended that I have fewer images. But I don't think fewer images is a good thing in the case of book review blogs. People want to see those cover images!
My email address can be found in my profile.
Website Grade 59
Google Page Rank 3
Google Indexed Pages 149
Traffic Rank 4,788,010
Blog Rank Not Ranked
Inbound Links 1,323
That's my overall summary. Its not as bad as I thought it would be (I didn't think I'd be a 59% grade), but I could do better. Unfortunately most of the suggestions the site gave me were unnecessary (a lot seemed to be about 'small businesses should not use blogspot and this is why' sort of things), but the image thing I can improve on. Its one of the things I'm gonna work on during this Bloggiesta thing actually :D
To sound like a broken record, I was completely shocked at my score, in a good way. I got an 89%. I was also surprised to learn that I had 4,511 incoming links (I wonder how many are on spam site?) and 196 subscribers. Didn't think it would be that high.
This was great. Will definitely keep this page bookmarked for future use!
Casey: bookworm4life (at) ymail (dot) com
I was happy about my results but didn't know how to add meta tags.Thank you for the link on "how to"-will go check it out.Also have no idea about alt images.Anyway,hope everyone has a good weekend!
Thanks so much for sharing this as I had not heard about Website Grader. I was happy that my blog had a grade of 87. The Secondary/High School readability level. I need to look into adding the meta tags.My traffic rank was in the top 9.97%. Blog Ranking in top 6.9% at Technorati.
I ran my blog through and was really surprised to see my grade come up as 98.2%! I will be adding a description to my blog...and look into posting on Digg.com as a result.
caribousmom (at) gmail (dot) com
Thanks!
Hi Everyone! I ran my blog through and my grade was 76, but figuring my blog is very new I guess I shouldn't feel too bad. My Google Page rank was 3, and my Alexa traffic rank was 2.49% which seems to be pretty good. The report told me I needed Meta tags, so that is my next assignment to work on. Also the report said I had too many images, so I started working on reducing the size of the non current post images and will keep that in mind for future posts. Wow, what a great tool! And a great challenge! Thanks! Suzanne, Chick with Books , quzy (at) mac (dot) com
For blogspot users-you have to remember after you have generated meta tags on meta generator please add / before each close bracket on each line otherwise it won't save in your template.
I was actually scared to do this because I never pay attention to any of the technical stuff, but I got a 92, and some other stuff I haven't quite digested yet. If Natasha makes this a regular event, I think I may focus on making the suggested changes next time. This is the first time I've even heard of Meta tags, so I have a lot to learn.
Thanks for the mini-challenge!
saz AT chainreader DOT com
I have heard of this site before and submit my blog quite frequently for grading. My current score is a 65, up from a 20 something just a couple of weeks ago. I have a 0 for my google pages ranking yet I have 83 ages that have crawled through google.
My biggest piece of frustration is coming up with meta tags and technorati. I have read the meta tags article and I think that will help me out. I cannot get Technorati to allow me to claim my blog. I have no idea why. Any takers on this one? I do ping my blog to Technorati frequently.
This mini-challenge is fun! Thanks for posting!
Wow, this is a great tool. I did much better than I would have though they would. The technorati thing makes me sad. I've tried claiming it, and even contacted their support and just got a form letter in reply saying the can't help me. *le sigh*
The biggest thing that surprised me was that Bloglines reported my feed subscribers at over 1300, which is much, much, much higher than I thought it was (I was think it was around, oh, 150).
The biggest recommendation was adding a subscribe button, which fits right in my feedburner to do list! Great challenge.
BTW, was anyone else fascinated by the little animation at the bottom of the page when it was generating the report. I'm so easily amused... :-)
shadyglade (AT) mail (DOT) com
Hey!
the Grader site was so helpful!
I got a 70 (after I added the meta tags, before it was 69) and it was quite higher than I thought it would be
Google Rank it's 1, but I don't know what that means.
Readability: secondary/high school (pretty good considering English is my second language, I think).
Technorati is just not working for me but I'll keep trying
Biggest surprise? Having so many images isn't so good!
And the number of feed suscribers (1,356) thought it would be much less.
I think something might be wrong with the number they are reporting on feed subscribers because I ran both my blog and Daniel's and we both had the same number of subscribers - which is the same high number some people are reporting here. No way that's legit.
Thanks for the link to how to do meta tags. I'm on it!
I just ran the website grader. I think it was very fun to do! It told me to add meta tags to all pages -- which I'd never done yet. The "grade" was 96, so I don't want to change much. But I will add meta tags. I too was surprised that "images" isn't such a good thing. I think that's because of my web template, though, and I don't want to mess with it.
It told me I had 8 subscribers, which I'm sure is not right; Feedburner tells me there are 100-150, usually.
I'm familiar with this site, so I'd used it before. My website grade is 92% (yay!); the last time I'd checked it was 84%. It increased after I added a webform for folks to subscribe to my blog via email.
My Google page rank is 4, which I'm pretty happy with too.
I'm mystified by the fact that Bloglines reports "about 1,356" subscribers though. That seems WAY too high!
One thing I definitely need to do is add metadata tags.
The other thing that's interesting about Website Grader is that you can grade anyone's blog, which you can then compare to yours.
shereadsandreads(at)gmail(dot)com
Okay, updated post:
No meta tags or keywords. ):
Too many images, too little with alt tags.
Google Pagerank is 2.
loony_balooga_91@hotmail.com
Hey mine is up!! Woohoo! 70 is not really that high, but it's up from 65 or whatever.
SO... gotta work on that whole metadata thing.
And the interior page description thing.... whatever that is. I don't even know.
I have no desire to share my score (ouch), but I was impressed with some of my rankings. I'm currently not in Technorati, so I suppose I should get on the ball there. Yeah, I'm pretty sure the info about subscribers is not accurate - in the 1,000s? I don't think so. Is there another way to check this?
librariansbook(at)gmail(dot)com
71% (I know I can do better!) I dont know how to use meta or delicious and those are both lacking in my site. I will find some time to see how to make those work for me. Great to know about this as I had no idea you could do this.... now I cant wait to see what my next score will be! Thanks!
93 percent. I'll take it. Yes, there are things I don't have, like meta keywords, but I'm happy with what I have on a wordpress.com site. However, it's good to see what can be done to improve-- as long as it doesn't cost me money. ;)
81 probably isn't bad for a 2 month old blog.
I'm trying to figure out how to add meta tags on a Wordpress.com hosted blog, particularly without CSS access. That's probably my next step.
I wish that WordPress.com used the tags/catagories for keywords.
My Google Page Rank is still 1. I guess I'll just concentrate on continuing to improve my writing, and hopefully more people will link to me and it will improve.
I also should look into de.licio.us and digg, and see if there is something I should be doing.
Thank you for hosting this challenge!
Just ran MsBookish through Website Grader. 97/100. What surprised me was the number of inbound links. I think I'd better look into adding a copyright attribution note to my feed (can you tell I'm feeling suspicious today??) LOL
OKay, so I did whatever hey told me to, and my score increased from 78 to 90!
Check it out here.
loony_balooga_91@hotmail.com
Fantastic resource! I have a score of 95 and it showed me some things that I've been missing along the way. Thanks for pointing it out.
I had a 70-something earlier this week. But, then I messed around with stuff and now I have a 36. Yikes! It's back to going through all the meta tags and such. Plus, I'm a new blog, so I don't even have a google rank yet. That will come with time I'm sure.
emilysreadingroom AT gmail DOT com
I got a score of 66 - I didn't even expect it to be that high! This is a cool website. Thanks for sharing the link!
vtgoat[at]gmail[dot]com
Has anyone gotten the Meta tags to work through blogger? I went to the link Ruth posted and tried it but when I went to edit HTML I got an error message. From the comments there this has happened quite a bit for others and I'm not sure if there is another way to make it work.
@Bonnie: what was your error message? Did your tag end with a slash, like "<meta blah blah blah/>"?
Okay, I figured it out and was able to add Meta Tags but it only increased my website grade from 87 to 89. It also told me that "Your meta description should be no more than 150 characters". Also, "We believe that though the search engines don't weigh keywords as heavily as they used to, they're still important to get right. By using a high number of keywords, it is possible that you are diluting the effect of your most important keywords. We would suggest keeping the keywords to 10 or less."
@Abbot..yes, that was the message. I figured out from another site that I had to change ' to " and that worked. I tried to reduce the characters in my description and it didn't work so I just left it like it was as it's working now.
This was a fascinating challenge! I'm definitley going to use website grader to make some improvements to my blog. My grade was 85/100 and the two main things that lower my score are my lack of meta-data and that I need to do a 301 redirect. From what I can see that means that my site will be recognizable as the same site regardless of whether you include the www or not. Something I need to learn about.
Thanks so much for this challenge :)
Alright, it's killing me. I started off at a grade of 36 and have only improved to a 55 now. Oh well, progress is progress. I think my head is spinning with codes now. Oi! Great though, to know how to put myself more out there.
Oh, here's my email address - bittahsweetharmony@yahoo.com
I just switched the link for the Blogger meta tags tutorial to one that is much clearer and walks you through the process step-by-step. I think this is the same one that I used, successfully, several months ago. So if you're having trouble getting the tags to work, please try the new link.
I did the grader before I added a few improvements so I will be looking forward to redoing it next week to see if it officially improved.
My original report is here and my blog is 6 months old and I competed against MawBooks blog which a year older at least.
I got a grade of 79, Google Page Rank of 4, and the readability is Secondary / High School.
I have added Meta Tags & I will need to get the ShareThis on the posts.
marieburton2004 at yahoo dot com
Wow. I was totally surprised by a grade of 91! I didn't think my blog would score nearly that high. Seems as if I, like a lot of others, need to add meta data to my blog. But since it's getting late, I'll probably have to figure out how to do that after the bloggiesta ;o). I'm not sure my list of bloggy things to do got any shorter during the bloggiesta -- the items on it just changed.
passionforthepage (at) gmail (dot) com
Oh, yeah. Totally forgot to add my email--
schriftstellarin(at)hotmail.com
I did mine and its 84. I was told I have too many images on my blog. Got some helpful tips that I plan on trying to do after this weekend.
Great mini Challenge.
thanks for this post - it was very helpful, although I have to do much to improve my site. my score was quite low.
a few of the items are quite confusing though, how to have my url, with and without the www show up in a search. I will have to figure out how to create more links, too.
I can do the simpler straightforward changes first. Reduce the pictures and items that cause my site to take a while to upload.
The technical items can be intimidating and confusing. It does help to know that others are working on this too and that it's possible to ask questions and for tips.
I'm glad I signed up.
gaby317nyc AT gmail DOT com
I've tried the Web grader before (and again just now) but it always tells me I have an invalid URL. Dunno why.
I know my readability is usually around 5th grade, which is okay, I guess. Makes me feel a little dumb, but I know everyone who reads it understands what I'm saying. I could do college level, but what good would that do?
This was a really interesting challenge, and now that I've got my blog graded I actually feel a bit better about my Google standing!
I got a 94/100, which isn't too bad (I'm so jealous of Becky's 99!); my Google PageRank is 3; my readability is elementary school level (oh dear); everyone except Wordpress wants me to have meta tags (lol).
I was surprised that Google cared about how long my domain was registered for! I had only registered mine for a year (so it was down to about 5 months left), so Website Grader was all upset and saying I should register it for longer. So I did (another year), and now it's happy with me. :D
Also apparently I have 5,998 inbound links, which was REALLY surprising. I think it mostly must be those spam linker things?
- Anastasia (herebebooks@gmail.com)
this was very helpful although a bit disheartening. i added metadescriptions to my blog. I'll have to do a number of intimidating technical fixes, but the sooner i get started the better. i'll have to figure out how to have searches find my url with and without the "www", how to create inbound links, how to figure out "dugg", cut down on the photos or other items that cause the slow posting of my pages.
thanks!
I graded my site earlier in the month. In just a few weeks I went from 82 to 86. All I've done is (1) add the All-In-One-SEO plugin for Wordpress and (2) sign up for Technorati. The first time I ran my site through was in January and I wish I had printed out my grade card to find out how much it's improved in six months.
Earlier today I signed up for the DMOZ directory but it could be months before my site is added. I noticed my traffic rank fell but that's no surprise. Blog tours seem to bring the most amount of traffic and I only do one or two a month.
amber at amberstults.com
Ugh. My grade was pretty bad. I'm hoping that is just because I moved to a self-hosted blog on Friday so I'm not ranked in a lot of places. dasuzuki at yahoo dot com
I've been trying to comment here for the last hour. Windows keeps shutting down your site, on two different computers! I'm on Firefox now.
My grade was 67, surprisingly good considering I don't know much. I added my blog URL to Delicious. The metatag deal for WP might not matter so much because they allow you to add tags and an excerpt for each post.
Egads! That's DD's ID. I'm sallyhanan.wordpress.com
I graded my blog. It was 97.4 out of 100. They suggested adding it to the DMOZ directory, which I did.
This is a fantastic mini-challenge Ruth! I ran my report and was surprised to see a rating of 79. My blog is fairly new (a couple months old) so I think having a number like that is excellent. I've not had the opportunity to do much with the data it provided but I hope to go through it in detail over the coming weeks.
I can't figure out where they're getting the inbound link information. You can ask Google how many in-bound links it thinks you have by putting "link:your.url.com" into the search thing. The grader tool tells me 2481, but Google search only finds 10. I don't think either of those numbers is correct! :)
My grade ended up being a cool 90. I was really happy with that. I need to add a meta-description and meta keywords, which is something I'll be working on for the rest of the week.
Just did the website grading this morning and have added meta-description and meta keywords. Can't wait to see how my score changes. Thanks!
My score went up to 87%--not too shabby! :) The thing that really hurts me is that I have "too many images." :P Oh well. I like my images. :)
Use this link below to find out how many inbound links you have from each search engine.Click on the amounts and it will show you who is linking to you and how
http://www.submitexpress.com/linkpop/
Really great ideas. I like every example. Just might have to try these... more templates easy to download
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