Grade your website

Today I want to talk about one of my favorite online tools.  HubSpot (who maintains a terrific blog on internet marketing) offers this tool for free use called Website Grader.  All you need to do is input your website address, list some competing website and put in your email address.  Give it a few minutes to grade your website and it gives you a lengthy report back.  I want to take some time explaining each of these areas and how to improve your “grade”.  The list is long so I will only cover the most important ones.

While waiting for my site be be graded I got this great quote from the Grader: “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing about.” – Ben Franklin.  This really echos HubSpot’s (and OptimalWeb’s) idea on the kind of content that you should be publishing on your website.  The idea is to have exceptional content that is truly engaging, do this and the traffic will come.

First the grader looks to find a blog on your website.  This one is number one for a reason, a blog covers so many different areas of improving your ranking with the search engines.

1. First it provides a channel to provide great content to your website visitors.  There bored at looking at static 5 page “online brochures” and your site is interesting so they subscribe, bookmark it, rss it etc.
2. Second, it provides a constant flow of new content and keywords for the search engine.  Think as this as food for Google’s search spiders.  Each new articles is a new opportunity to introduce more keywords and specific on site content.
3. Below I get more into inbound links but the blog serves as a reason for somebody to generate one of these links.  For example, lets say you write a great article, “How to…”.  Somebody finds this interesting and creates a link to it on there blog or website.  You will see the importance of this more below.

The next section is on how well is your site optimized.   It is looking at stuff called metadata.  Metadata is data about data, it is for the search engines and it tells them what things are so they know (there computers after all!).  You want to make sure you have both meta description and meta keywords. Meta description is what frequently shows up under your page title in search results and meta keywords tells the search engine what keywords to match to your site.  The method for adding this or editing this changes from software to software so do a Google search (i.e. “How to add meta data DramWeaver…) to find a tutorial or if your doing your website the old fashion way here is a nice tutorial.

Inbound links section is also very important if not the most important section.  Inbound links are links from one website to your website.  The more of these inbound links you have the better.  Not only is this number important but the sites your getting these links from also is key.  For example, let say your a plumber and you got a link from one from Kohler.  Not only do they get a TON of traffic, it in your same industry, this inbound link is as good as gold.  To learn more about how to raise your inbound links check out this previous article: http://optimalweb.biz/10-ways-to-build-inbound-links