HubSpot and Website Grader

by Amy Stevens AdamscloseAuthor: Amy Stevens Adams Name: Amy Stevens Adams
Email: amy@capecodbranding.com
Site: http://capecodbranding.com
About: http://www.amystevensadams.comSee Authors Posts (34)

In a recent article on Canonical Redirects, I mentioned a company called Hubspot that offers a free Website Grader. It’s pretty simple, and extremely addicting. You enter your domain name, any competitor’s sites that you want to be compared to, and your email address… 30 seconds later you have a custom report, complete with the good, bad and ugly of your website.

Five days ago, when I first ran CCBbuzz through the Website Grader, I was given a score of 37%.  Miserably failing. We had all kinds of crippling issues that we didn’t even know existed. However, both John and I found it exciting and motivating to think that we have been receiving a flood of traffic, and our site only scored a 37% in ‘optimization’.
What I love about the Website Grader, is that it clearly defines what you need to do to improve your site. Here is a snapshot of the first three problems in our report.

As you can see, we were missing a page title, meta description and had too many keywords.  I fixed the three errors and ran the report again, this time scoring a 39.

The next two issues I resolved are shown below. You may read my blogs about 301 Redirects and Three Reasons to Register Your Domain for 10 Years.

I fixed the 301 Redirect, and our score went up to 46!

Next I submitted our site to Yahoo!, DMOZ and ZoomInfo. Each of these sites takes a while to ‘crawl’ your website and approve your submission, one even said it could take several months before they even look at our site!  However, even without the changes, the next time I ran the report, we were up to 47%.

Next, I figured out Technorati, set up an account for CCBbuzz and added the automatic ping code to our blog (read directions in my post titled, 5 Quick Things Every Blogger Should Do). This bumped our Website Grader score up to 48% and subsequently 53% when Technorati moved us from the top 3.53% to 1.99%.

That was the last change I made from the Website Grader recommendations. Since then, our Google Indexed pages has gone from 0 to 71.

I’ve checked the Website Grader twice since my last change and we’ve moved to 54% and now we’re at 55%.  The key is that eventually the changes you make will start to take off, like a snowball, and as you gain momentum and start getting noticed in search engines and in the Blogoshere, you will see improved traffic and optimization of your site.

Website Grader is just a starting point to get your blog or website going. After that, the job of optimizing your site will be an ongoing process, but well worth the effort.

One final note, just for fun I entered StevePavlina.com in my report as a competitor’s site, and his grade came up as 99.6%!  That gives John and me something to work toward!

The first time we ran the Website Grader, we scored a terrible 37%. After 5 days, and about 15 total hours of work, I was able to increase our score to 55%. We will continue to work on our score and optimization, and will periodically update with our results.  Site optimization is vital to a healthy, strong website!

-Amy Stevens Adams of Cape Cod Branding

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