24Jul

Website Grader

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I was looking through some archived articles on Smashing Magazine and found a link to this Website Grader. The information it gives is very comprehensive, but not too complicated. Personally, I plan to use this site to demonstrate to my clients’ sites SEO and marketing strength, if I get any queries from them. It’s a great authoritative resource.

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3 Comments

  1. Kieran O'Shea

    27 Jul 08 @ 23:57

    Good find there Christina, could prove very useful. My site scored 93:)

  2. Christina Fowler

    28 Jul 08 @ 11:21

    That is a fab score Kieran!!
    It is a great tool - unfortunately many of the factors in the scoring are not easily controllable, like the number of websites that link to you or your PageRank. But as I said the report is very comprehensive and spots many areas where you could improve your SEO, which I have not found on other SEO sites.

  3. Kieran O'Shea

    30 Jul 08 @ 10:40

    Thanks :)

    For what its worth I have a few pieces of advice on SEO that have always held me in good stead that might prove useful for you or anyone else looking to raise their profile.

    1) Put a lot of information in the title tags; The post title, its category, perhaps its tags, your name or the site name, whichever is more appropriate. Dynamic sites like those powered by WordPress should make this easy. Its also an enormously important factor in being found by search engines. When you see your site in Google, note what gets highlighted in bold dark blue/black. More often than not its the title plus perhaps one word of the body text. This means that most of the match is happening on the title so the better the title is at describing the content, the more you will appear in results.

    I find something like this works a treat:
    Site Name » Category » Blog post title | tag1 tag2 tag3

    2) Choose your writing style and categories, list yourself on technorati and ensure your technorati profile details these categories. You’d be amazed at how much of your niche technical content (or whatever else) people want to read if it is clearly labeled as such.

    3) Provoke debate and discussion, canvass opinion and occasionally be controversial. Bloggers love to make references to others and the more provoking your content is the more this will happen (within reason of course). While some of your praise will most certainly come in comment form which is fairly useless for SEO, some will invariably come in trackback form from other blogs. Each trackback is a link back to you and boosts your search ranking. The more “important” a site that writes you a trackback the better your search ranking will become. Some of the biggest boosts to my search engine rankings have come from big blogs picking up my comments and writing about them.

    So for the moment of truth (searching on “kieran” - search terms concerning what I have written about do even better)

    Just UK Google: 2nd place
    World Google: 3rd place

    I only ever followed the above pieces of advice so if my rambling blog can do it I’m sure many others can :)

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