Booksellers Blog

If you have a few minutes, you might find it valuable to check out Website Grader, a free service from Hubspot. You just enter the URL of your website, and in a few moments a full report will appear on screen. You don’t even have to enter your email address, though if you do, a copy of the report will be sent to you by email.

While I don’t think that you should obsess over your website grade. I have definitely seen improvements to our traffic (and our grade) when I take their suggestions. If nothing else, the report will point out things that you may not have thought about.

A few things to note:

• If you have a new website, chances are that you do not yet have a Google Page Rank. This will make your score considerably lower than it might be if the Page Rank was known. Google changes their Page Ranks fairly infrequently, so it might take a few months for your Page Rank to show up.
• Some things that could increase your score, like the Yahoo Directory, cost money. I wouldn’t recommend paying for those services just to increase your website grade. There may be other reasons to pay, but not this.
• I believe that Website Grader was designed for websites and not blogs that exist on their own. For that reason, you may see that you are marked down for having too many images on your site. If your blog is updated frequently you may indeed have many images, but unless they are slowing the load time for your site significantly, I wouldn’t worry about it.