I am sure a lot of the people know about this tool and I came across it back in June when I was thinking of moving from Blogger to WordPress, at David Airey’s blog and bookmarked it to come back to it. Once moved to WordPress, I submitted my URL to the grader and it came back with a lousy grade of 49 out of a 100 with a whole lot of red flags! The most demeaning thing of the analysis was that it analyzed the writing of the site at a 5th or 6th grader’s level! Well, I was too embarrassed to make a post about it then but did think of coming back after a few weeks of blogging. And I did submit the URL a few times after that and each time it gave a better and better rank.
Website Grader 
is a free SEO tool that provides an SEO score for your website with custom search engine optimization and marketing advice for your website. The tool will analyze just about any URL you want graded. You can also enter any of your keyword phrases about the marketing effectiveness of your website.
My newest grade:
Website Grade For fresh-perspectives.net : 94/100 (October 04, 2007)
A website grade of 94 for fresh-perspectives.net means that of the thousands of web sites that have previously been submitted to the tool, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 94% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness. The algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over a dozen different variables, including search engine data, website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others.
and the readability level has improved to 9th grade. This score measures the approximate level of education necessary to read and understand the web page content. In most cases, the content should be made to be simple so that a majority of the target audience can understand it.
It was also interesting to see the
SEO Capabilities of the Top 20 Bloggers
Interestingly, the grader also gives you information on how old your domain is and how many days before your domain expires.
“We would suggest renewing this domain with your registrar. Google and other search engines may penalize web sites with domains that are set to expire soon. The reason for this is that many spam sites are often registered for short periods of time. “
Now, I don’t know how it missed so many Inbound Links because according to Yahoo’s siteexplorer service, there are 2575 links pointing to this site, and according to Google , there are 4375 links pointed from other sites! May be I am missing something here?
And I am a bit confused about the warning “More than one H1 tag found ”
“More than one primary heading tags (H1 tags) have been found on the page. Though this is not a critical issue, it is unusual for a web page to contain more than one heading tag. We suggest having a single primary heading per page”
I use Windows Live Writer and the post titles are given the H1 heading type, So…
Is there a way to stop that? Is it of any serious concern?
Other than that, I really liked the service. As a follow up, they also provide a free review of your site and provide consultation on what you can do to improve your score and use your website to generate more leads for your business. I think its a superb service provided by HubSpot Internet Marketing, if you want to try it!
Technorati Tags: SEO, Blogging
Mike Volpe (HubSpot)
This is Mike from HubSpot Internet Marketing (we built the WebsiteGrader SEO Tool) Thanks for the review and the link. Let me try to answer some of the questions people have in the comments:
1) Google vs. Yahoo Inbound Links
Both numbers are “correct” they are the numbers that the two search engines say you have in terms of links. However Google does not like to give good information, because they don’t like people to figure out how to exactly compute Page Rank and things like that. From my experience, the Yahoo number is a lot more correct and is the one you should use for reference.
2) Reading Level
This is based on the lenght of words, length of sentences and length of paragraphs. And higher (i.e. PhD level) is NOT better. You are better off with something lower, maybe around 8th grade. A lower grade level typically means that the content is more scanable, which means it is more readable, especially on the web.
Thanks!