What Grade Does Your Web Site Deserve?
I found a great online resource that I’d like to share with you. It’s an online service that “grades” your web site.
It can be used as a tool that will help you to see and understand what deficiencies your site may have. Of course, the idea is to then work on fixing those details.
The site allows you to type in your URL (like “www.mydomain.com”), press a button, and a few seconds later your grade pops up. The grade is a number between 1 and 100.
Just like a test in school, the higher your grade, the more your web site conforms to all the things that make a web site good. To see all the variables that are tested, you will need to go to the web site itself.
I just graded my web site at Business Alone and was given an “89.” I’m doing OK, I suppose, but there is certainly room for improvement.
One of the reasons I enjoy this service is because you are given the reasons why your site is graded as it is. In other words, you are told the reasons for your score.
This is what the service told me about Business Alone:
“The website www.businessalone.com ranks 321,950 of the 2,898,662 websites that have been ranked so far.”
“A website grade of 89/100 for www.businessalone.com means that of the millions of websites that have previously been evaluated, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 89% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness. The algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over 50 different variables, including search engine data , website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others.” (depending upon when you read this post, the ranking most likely will have changed)
Here are the specific things that are taken into consideration (and that are explained for the particular web site in question):
1. Create Content – the quality and quantity of the written word on your site.
A. Blog Analysis
B. Blog Grade
C. Recent Blog Articles
D. Google Indexed Pages
E. Readability Level
2. Optimize – how well you have optimized your content so that it is found by the search engines on the web.
A. Metadata
B. Heading Summary
C. Image Summary
D. Interior Page Analysis
E. Domain Info
F. MOZ Rank
G. Last Google Crawl Date
H. Inbound Links
3. Promote – how well you are promoting your web site content on the Internet at some of the most important and popular spots.
A. Delicious bookmarks
B. Link Tweet Summary
C. Twitter Grade
D. Google Buzz Count
4. Convert – turning as much of your traffic as possible into customers and sales.
A. RSS Feed
B. Conversion Form
5. Analyze – how well your web site compares with other similar sites.
A. Traffic Rank
B. Score Summary
A couple of cautions are in order.
First, different web sites have different purposes. If your web site is a large “hub” type authority site filled with mega content, lots of back links, etc, your score will be higher than if it’s a simple squeeze page where you’re only concern is capturing a name and email address. So the purpose of your site will be partially responsible for your graded score.
Second, this isn’t the “be all – end all” of web site analysis tools. What is important in this system may not be that critical in your industry or niche.
This is simply a tool to help you understand where your web site could be “beefed up” to be more search engine friendly and more attractive to web users.
The name of this service is Website Grader by Hubspot and it can be found online at:
Website Grader It’s a free service and allows you to compare your web site grade to that of your competition.
You simply input your URL, the URLs of your competitors, and hit the “generate report” button at the bottom. Try it out and see how your web sites score!
