Tool of the Month: Website Grader
by theoneinventor on August 11, 2010
I had the opportunity to check out a free web rating tool that could be particularly useful for those new to digital marketing. It’s not very complex but gives you a lot to think about.
Website Grader www.websitegrader.com allows you to quickly and easily get an overview of how a website rates based on many different factors that impact online exposure. While the “grade” isn’t the most accurate, it does do a pretty good job of evaluating different aspects of web presence, providing a good overview of areas with potential for improvement.
One reason Website Grader (WG) stands out is because of the way it lays out information. It manages to impart a breadth of information while still keeping it organized in a manner that makes the data easy to understand. The WG report organizes data according to several categories, including content, search engine optimization factors, promotional/social media, conversion, and analysis.
As the mantra goes; content is king, and the content section is particularly useful in evaluating the quality and freshness of a website’s content. WG analyzes whether the site has a blog, identifies recent blog posts, how many pages of the site are indexed by Google and the reading level(vocabulary wise) of the content on the site.
The optimization section of WG provides an analysis and recommendations on metadata, heading tags, images, interior pages, and inbound links. Information on these aspects of the site will help you to understand whether the site looks relevant to a search engine algorithm i.e. whether Google might rank it highly for someone’s search on topics related to the site’s content.
The promotion section of WG reports on a site’s visibility across various social media outlets such as del.icio.us, Twitter, and Google Buzz. One weakness of WG is that it currently is not able to identify Facebook following, which is potentially worth at least as much or more than Google Buzz or Twitter.
The conversion section of WG is the least useful because it assumes that any kind of contact form or RSS feed is meant to convert visitors without evaluating how effective those may be. We know that just having and RSS feed doesn’t mean much by itself.
Lastly the analysis section gives a brief overview of the website, grade, and some of the factors that went into scoring it.
Website Grader is a useful tool to gain insight into the basics of a website, check it out.
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