Website Grader

Maybe because I was an Accountant once upon a time, or maybe just because I'm nosy, I like to analyse what I'm doing right and wrong. Heaven knows I had it drilled into my head enough in accounting to analyse everything. Even now that I've said a fond farewell to the accounting field, my day job boss expects me to analyse reports for him.

And I find myself analysing my website and book sale performance.

I'm a sucker when it comes to widgets and links that promise to analyse my performance. Thus today when I spied a widget that said "My website grade is 98%" I had to find out what my grade was.
I clicked on Website Grader and within moments an analysis of my blog was emailed to me.

Unfortunately, I didn't earn a 98%. My grade is 81%.

In academic terms that's a B- on a 10 point scale. In real terms it means that 19% of all websites taken into account by this program are superior to mine. On the positive side, 80% are not as good. More specifically, this means www.ashleyladd.blogspot.com ranks 361,126 of the 1,874,088 websites that have been ranked so far. Since many blogs are abandoned, 80% may not be as high as it initially appears.

Website Grader gave me a few suggestions for improvement. Some will be easy to implement such as add metadata to my site such as meta description and meta keywords.

Others won't be as easy such as increasing traffic to my site. Traffic is something I constantly struggle to attract, oftentimes to the detriment of writing stories.

According to this analysis I have too many pictures on my site. I would have guessed just the opposite. Several of my posts have no pictures. Most of the popular blogs I visit show one picture per post.

Website Graders informed me my domain is scheduled to expire in a year. I didn't know Blogger sites expired. I will have to look into this to see if this is something I can fix or if it's something Blogger will do automatically behind the scenes.

My website has an "Alexa" rank of 5,308,741 which is in the top 17.071 % of all websites. if this is true, why do my Site Meter analytics suck? Before tonight, I had never heard of Alexa but of course I will research it now.

Ashleyladd.blogspot.com has 3,399 inbound links. Really? That sounds like a lot of links. So why is my page rank only 3 out of 10 with Google?

Blog Grader gave me a grade of 67. In other words, a lousy D.

At the end of the report there's a free download of internet marketing tips to help improve my site. Free is within my budget so business student that I am, I will probably look into it. I could never stand to fail. I was always one of those annoying students who had to earn A's and B's. C's and below kill me.

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