Will the Search Engines Find You?

Did you ever go into an exam thinking you were in good shape only to discover that the questions weren’t asking what you had studied? You’ve got a website. You love it. It’s beautiful… but does it pass the “Search Engine Exam?” Find out how your website ranks in several critical categories and get suggestions for fixing problems – all for FREE!

Or maybe you don’t have a website yet, and I’m going to tell you why this tip is gold for you as well, because you can learn from the mistakes and successes of others.

Pick a website – yours, a competitor’s, or a friend’s – and go to WebsiteGrader.com, which is a free service provided by HubSpot.com. Enter the URL of the website you want to find out about and your email and click the “Generate Report” button. In a minute or so, your grade will pop up on the screen along with some highly valuable information. The report will also be sent to your email address.

Two hands typing on a black keyboard.

Some of the more instructive areas of evaluation are:

• Content – This area gives you some interesting information about your blog in addition to telling you how many pages are indexed by the Search Engines and what the readability level of your content is.
• Optimize – In this section, your metadata, heading, and image information are analyzed and suggestions are made for improvement. A few of your internal pages are analyzed. Your domain information and page rank are evaluated and explained, and you will discover how many external domains are linking to your site.
• Promote – You will discover information about your site from Twitter and Facebook, and also get information about your RSS feed and conversion forms.

As I said before, even if you don’t have a website yet, WebsiteGrader can be helpful. Why? Because it gives you an opportunity to see how effective other websites are in these areas. A website must do more than just look nice in order to forward your business. By evaluating other websites, you can gain important insights into what you need to do on your own website.

Come back and let us know, how did your website do?
Kim Avery