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Earlier today I came across a free online tool every website owner and SEO consultant could use to help them build a more search engine friendly site. Hubspot is offering to help analyze your website for issues and grades your site from zero to hundred over your site’s marketing effectiveness. The test runs quickly and you can compare your stats to another site in your niche. The analyzer is called Website Grader and it uses an algorithm that is a proprietary blend of over 50 different variables, including search engine data , website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others data. Website Grader will grade your site on content, optimization, site promotion, conversion, and analyze / compare to other sites.
The Test
I decided to test this site using Famous Bloggers website since I know it has a page rank of 4 and I know the owner of the site has a good SEO policy in place. After entering the domain name in and waiting about a minute for the algorithm to complete its test and display the results I found the results page to easy to read and broken down into subjects. Within these subjects, it breaks downs further to give you even more results about your site.
As a website administrator and designer I can use this tool to find, research, and correct any issues that Website Grader found. Website Graber will also give you an explanation of why it ran the test why you should fix an issue the grader found. The one part of the grader I did not find all that useful was running the website comparison grader. This test does not run the test for sites and shows results for both sites. But it does show a summary of website grade, Moz Rank, number of pages indexed By Google, blog grade, inbound links, and Delicious bookmarks for the two sites I tested.
Final Thoughts
After using this tool for about week, I found it does a good job at finding issues that I need to correct on my site and I fixed a few of them. I have read reviews on this tool and several users have stated that the tool inaccurate and not a very good tool. For the sites that I use to tool for, they are accurate and find the issues the grader has found. Just a reminder, any tool can be inaccurate, I have found inaccuracies in several analytic tools and that is why I use several tools to test my site and study web traffic on the sites I am maintaining.
Run some tests and tell me what you think…
About James
Hi James — Thanks for the nice review of Website Grader. Glad you found the tools useful.
Regarding the lack of competitors function you mentioned: I'm glad you raised this! This is something that came up a few days ago when we were doing user testing of the site. This is definitely an issue lots of users are running into, so we'll add the problem to the backlog.
I love these types of tools! I hadn't used Website grader for a while so it was good to do it again. I found some helpful things that I need to be fine tuning on my blog.
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Thank you very much for this very useful article.
Website graders are really useful.
I have just re-checked my website and it has improved extensively since the last time I did it, as my website is graded at 98.8%
Hey James, it seems like a useful tool. I know I should go over old posts in my site and set alt and title attributes for images and links but this website seems to save me the trouble of detecting the ones that are missing. thanks
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Yes, so far it has help me a lot of time fixing issues that I never new I had. I check it every time I add new code or a plugin.
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Another good one ishttp://www.mysitegrader.com/ Pretty intuitive and free.
Much thanx !
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I love website grader. I’ve been using it for a while and it actually brought to my attention area of my blogs I could improve.
It’s a great tool!
lol amazing info bro.
Hi James, I have run some tests and Blog Grader and Website Grader really helped my improve my blog. These *free* services check for basic functionality on your blog. Do you have an RSS feed? I didn’t. Do you have buttons for Facebook and Twitter? I didn’t. Do you have a contact form and an e-mail list sign-up form. I had neither. How many linkbacks do you have? Any .edu or .gov linkbacks? What is your Alexa ranking? Mine was lousy. I kept working on all these failings. My Website score is now 99 and Blog score is 95. My Alexa score has been dropping about 3,000 each day. These scoring sites are fun to use, and offer simple-to-understand remedies (including how hard they are to fix). My tests show that if you follow the advice of Blog Grader and Website Grader, your blog will improve.