The Website Grader Report

Is it perfect? No. Is it useful for understanding the "big picture" view of your site? Absolutely. And the best part - it's FREE!

Another advantage is that you can compare your site against your competitor's site to see exactly how you stack up. Very informative.

So how does it work? Here's a quick overview of just what the Website Grader will be looking for when they send their spies over to check out your site.

Using the Website Grader

1. Your full website URL
2. Competing websites you would like included in the report (this is optional)
3. Your email for receiving a link to the final report

Enter this info, press 'Generate Report' and sip your Starbucks for a few seconds while the Website Grader does its job. Analysis can take anywhere from 15 seconds to a a minute or two. When complete, you'll be immediately taken to the results and will also receive an email with a link to the final report should you wish to access it at a later time.

Scoring Parameters for the Website Grader

1. META Data: How defined and useful are the Meta tags on your homepage? The grader looks at your Page Title, Meta Description, and Meta Keyword tags. Suggestions are offered for improvement.
2. Heading Summary: How well are you using your heading tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) on your homepage? Proper use of heading tags alerts the search engines (and your reader) as to what your page content is all about.
3. Image Summary: Do you have so many images on your page that it affects the page loading time? Are you labeling your pictures appropriately using the ALT tag?
4. Interior Page Analysis: The grader looks at a few additional pages deeper in your site to evaluate existing Keyword and Description tags.
5. Readability Level: This factor measures the approximate level of education required to read and understand your web pages.
6. Domain Info: The search engines love stable websites that have been around a while and show signs of staying that way. This section measures the age of your site as well as the expiration date of your domain.
7. Google PageRank: Although PageRank Score is not the best indication of website authority, it is included here out of completeness. The Website Grader gives you the current PageRank of your site.
8. Google Indexed Pages: This section tells you how many pages of your site are indexed in Google. If you have perfectly good pages that are not being indexed, you will need to find out why.
9. Last Google Crawl Date: What? Google hasn't been to your site in over 3 weeks? Frequent content updates gets the search engine spiders coming back more often to check out your new pages. This section lets you know when they last visited.
10. Traffic Rank: This sections provides your Alexa Rank, an indication of how your website ranks among all the other sites Alexa monitors.
11. Inbound Links: Inbound links are critical for driving traffic to your site. You must have a solid link building campaign that never stops. The grader provides an approximate count of your inbound links.
12. DMOZ Directory: DMOZ is one of the oldest hand-edited directories around. Unfortunately, because it is run by volunteers, it has really degraded into quite a mess. Still, it is considered good practice to get listed. This section tells you whether or not your site in already in the directory.
13. Yahoo! Directory: The Yahoo! directory is another Tier 1 directory that the search engines still respect. It costs $300 per year just to get listed (assuming your site passes the manual review). This section tells you if you have a listing (although I would think you would know this already if you plunked down 300 bucks!)
14. Zoom Info: ZoomInfo is a business directory with over 3 million company listings. While I don't feel being in this directory is important for search engine success, the Website Grader does check to see if ZoomInfo has picked you up in their database.
15. Overall Blog Analysis: While I don't recommend every business owner jump into the blogosphere, a company blog can enhance your marketability depending on your products and target market. In this section, the Website Grader checks to ensure your blog can be found by the search engines, and gives a few statistics on your most recent blog posts.
16. Social Mediasphere: Are people talking about you? The more buzz you can generate through your marketing programs, the more your message will spread through the social media universe. This section gives statistics on how your site is doing with two popular social media sites.
17. Converting Visitors to Leads: This section is a bit of a misnomer, but it does check to see if you have an RSS feed and also looks to see if your site contains at least one website registration form. Not very helpful information, and in my opinion, this section could have been completely omitted.
18. Keyword Grader: This section takes some of the keywords from your homepage and gives you an estimated monthly search volume as well as an indication of your current rankings.

Conclusions and Final Recommendations

So how much confidence should you place in this tool? Consider it a 10,000 foot view of your site. If your scoring below 75-80, you have some issues you'll definitely want to address. If you're scoring below 50, you have some serious problems! The grader will help point out these trouble spots so that you can work to correct them.

Be aware that there are many search engine factors the Website Grader doesn't touch. Things like the quality of inbound links coming to your site, or the actual quality of your page content.

While it's important to optimize your site for the search engines, don't forget that humans are your most valuable visitor, not the search engine spiders. Delight your visitors and the search engines will automatically take notice.

As a quick and simple tool for basic search engine optimization scoring, I highly recommend you give Website Grader a try! Just click the below link to go directly to their homepage.