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Website Grader: We Need To Bring Our Grade Up

For this Project Blogger event, I decided to find a disinterested third party to grade Julie Ferenzi's blog, Living In Plainfield, Illinois.

I'm going to use Website Grader.

While my focus with Julie is not about the technical issues, but about the content, knowing this information is important. You should know it about your site as well.

We just moved Julie from her old, free, Wordpress.com hosted site, to her new self hosted Wordpress blog on our servers. So, it's only been up less than 48 hours. That means not a lot of activity should be reflected. That means that NOW is the right time to do a baseline grade.

A link to the report card is Here. Based on the overall rating, the only place to go is UP! (The original blog we created at Wordpress.com was given a 62/100 overall rating. You can see that report here.) For comparison only, the same report run for Greg Swan's apprentice's site, TheBrickRanch.com, which has been up just a bit longer, yields a score of 40/100 for all websites and 26/100 for business blogs. That report is here. Time and content alone will cure many of the woes that create the low scores. That is evidenced by the exact same content being rated higher on her old blog. In fact, the scores may not even be the same when you click on the links above, perhaps influenced by this very post. The links in this post will help both Julie and Terri. :)

Here are the major details on what Website grader came back with at the time of the report:

WebSite Grade For http://www.livinginplainfield.com : 29/100 (overall)

A website grade of 29 for http://www.livinginplainfield.com means that of the thousands of websites that have previously been submitted to the tool, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 29% 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.

The software is constantly being upgraded and the algorithm enhanced. The number of potential recommendations provided by the tool is also increasing frequently. Please check back often.

Compared To Other Business Blog Websites : 22/100

Type Specific Score: http://www.livinginplainfield.com
When compared to other Business Blog websites, http://www.livinginplainfield.com scored a 22/100. This means that it is has a higher score than 22% of the Business Blog websites that have been processed by the system.

Google PageRank : 0

"Google PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves important weigh more heavily and help to make other pages important."
-From Google

Google Indexed Pages : 0

Measures the approximate number of pages on http://www.livinginplainfield.com that have been stored in the Google index. The Google web crawler will visit the website periodically and look for new content and store it in its index. Generally, the more pages a website has within the Google cache, the better.

The last time that Google has crawled http://www.livinginplainfield.com was March 26, 2007 @ 03:11 PM

Google Crawl Date : March 26, 2007 @ 03:11 PM

Google will periodically crawl websites looking for new and updated content. In general, it is desired to have the frequency with which Google crawls a site to be higher, rather than lower. Sites that get crawled more often have more frequent updates and more authority.

Inbound Links

One of the most important measures for a website is how many other sites are linking to it. The more links the better.

Links Summary

Google :	0
Yahoo :	0
Alexa :	N/A
MSN :	N/A

Technorati Ranking : N/A

Technorati is a popular website ranking service. It measures the popuplarity of a given website as compared to all other sites that have been submitted to its system.

This website currently has a Technorati ranking of N/A.

del.icio.us bookmarks : 0

del.icio.us is a web-based bookmarking site. Delicious users save their bookmarks on the website so they can access them from any browser. A website that has many users bookmarking it is generally popular and will get more traffic. http://www.livinginplainfield.com has about 0 bookmarks stored.

Alexa Traffic Ranking : N/A

Alexa is an online service that measures the approximate traffic for millions of sites on the Internet.

Currently, the site http://www.livinginplainfield.com is not being tracked by Alexa. This is usually the case if the site is relatively new or if the traffic level is not high enough to place it in the top million or so sites.

Readability Level : 11th 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.

I'll be using this as a way to see if our "focus on the relationships" strategy is working on the technical side as well.

Jeff Turner aka respres

Posted by Jeff Turner on 04/13/2007 02:42 PM

Comments (78)

website grader, google, pagerank, blogs, project blogger

Originally posted at: Turner's Perspective: Website Grader: We Need To Bring Our Grade Up

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Post is included in group: The Hubba Clubba...ROAR!

78 Comments on Website Grader: We Need To Bring Our Grade Up

APR

2007

Good info as usual and did you upgrade the wordpress to version 2.1.3?

Very cool, Jeff!! I've been sitting here checking my site, my AR blog, my company's site and our main competition's site. VERY interesting!! I think our company site needs to be "dumbed down" a bit, apparently it takes an advanced degree to understand it. :o)

{SVW Hubba}...

This stuff hurts my head.

I would much rather pay a geek than play a geek :)

TLW...ROAR!

Jay... yes. This is running on 2.1.3.

Sarah... very funny. I just went and checked again and it appears the changes we just made have already improved the page. Thankfully. :)

TLW [SVW]... well, consider me your free geek. Jut go plug in your site. Go plug in http://www.brokerbryant.com/ and see how it's fairing based on this grader.

I totally agree with TLW... wow information overload...

Jeff-I tried this out on my site and I can see where I need to make some adjustments. This is a great tool, very easy to understand and use. Thanks....

Nattalie... well forget about all the stuff below the overall grade. Use your basic grading system as a guide. 90-100 A, 80-90 B, 70-80, C, 60-70, D, Anything below 60 and you're failing in some way. If you put in your site and you get back what we just got back, then it's clear some things should be fixed. Then, go get a friendly geek to help you if you need it! :)

Midori... there are lots of others you can use as well, I just liked the way this one presented information and I needed something to use consistently as a benchmark.

Jeff does the site have a site map? I am in the process of switching themes and adding two site maps to my blog. One will be A XHTML site map and the other will be XML site map. Here is a link for a wordpress XHTML site map Generator . Scroll down to the bottom of the page for the example of how he does his site maps

Jeff.. no, it does not. But in about 15 minutes it will. :) Much thanks for this article and plugin!!! Great info!

Hmmm. What an instant reality check. My pagerank seems to be ok and my links are ok..They indicated that I didn't have a sign-up page and I do..not sure why.

Also, it says I don't have an RSS feed..not sure where I put this or if I have it. But, I'm always willing to learn.

Jeff Link... worked like a charm. We chose an extremely versatile template, so with a click of a button we were able to exclude that page from the page navigation. But it's there! Thank you!!!

Tracy... if you're working with someone on your site, send them the link to your report. You can get that at the bottom of the report page.

What an awesome site to analyze a website. I had no idea something like this was available. Very interesting.

Jeff,

I just went and analyzed my website.....Wow, I have some work to do!

Thank you Jeff for yet more quality information. BTW I wrote another post today Show Me The Money in which I mentioned Real Estate Shows and what it and Craig's List have done for me. Have a great weekend.

Terrific information, Jeff. Thanks for making this pubic so all can benefit. You and Paul are doing a great job and I imagine everyone here appreciates hearing from you...I certainly do (PS I just ordered my Kodak v705 as my other camera died).

Jeff

God, another great tool!!! Thanks as always Jeff.

Awesome! So cool to see what my sites are doing...and how I can improve!!!

http://www.tahoe360.com scored and 66/100

http://www.tahoetravis.com scored and huge 23/100...geez...

I need to get to work!

Thanks again great information!

Tahoetravis

Jeff

I am a Ten! HOORAY HOORAY

Oh yeah, its out of 100 --yikes! Lucy, you got some spaining to do.

I will need to find a yougun to help.

Julie! Who's a lucky girl? You're in good hands! Hard to put a figure on this kind of help.

And Jeff, I wish you'd stop doing stuff like this. How can I maintain a bone fide position that blogging is bogus if you keep doing this altruistic kind of crap!?

Jeff-I used the grader and I certainly am in need of help. There is no way I can do this by myself since I am the one that got me into this mess! Do you recommend using the link to Hot Spot and get some help from them? Thanks for the info as I am in the infant stages of learning about all of this. Aloha!

Thanks for the information, my websites scored 40/100 and 31/100 (overall) and the suggestions it made were of great value to me....

I'm going to be us their suggestions and advice to bring my numbers up much further

Thanks, again

All... well, if you now click on this link you will see that the minor changes we've made in the last few hours took her site from a 29/20 to a 54/43. Not bad for a little bit of attention to some details. There's still much room for improvement, but, again, most of that is going to come from great content. Let me tell you what plugins we added:

All In One SEO Pac the real impact of this won't be shown until the site begins to be crawled. The last time it was indexed was before there was content on the site.

XHTML site map Generator - Thank you to Jeff Link ASR,E-Pro, GRI

Changed the title and description tags to use the keywords we wanted to be found under. This change alone moved the ranking up 3 percentage points.

We went in and edited a couple of the posts for grammar. This took the grade level down from 11th to 9th. That's a good thing. It means it's easier to read.

Diane, Aziz... we all have some work to do.

George, I'm heading over to check it out now.

Jeff Dowler, can't wait to see some photos.

Bob, Travis, thanks!

Marcus, you don't really believe blogging is bogus anymore than you believe i'm doing this purely for altruistic reasons! :)

Paul, good stuff!

David Kucic, what is your site built on? Wordpress, Typepad, Blogger?

Jeff-I do it myself through a company called Register.com I dont know if any of those terms that you used (Wordpress, Typepad or Blogger) even apply to me using Register.com. Thanks for asking and I am REALLY looking forward to getting help. Aloha! Oh and by the way, nice bio. Six kids eh? I wish I was able to have that many but my previous career would not allow me too.

Jeff,

So dumbing up the copy is better? I think that's what I read....

David, it's not a blog... that's the first major problem. A blog platform, right out of the gate is going to get you better results.

Fran, some really great writing is done at the 9th grade level. :) "In most cases, the content should be made to be simple so that a majority of the target audience can understand it." I agree with that.

Jeff, what do we do when we just simply don't have time to hit the learning curve? I'm working 70 plus hours a week, and trying desperately to keep my points up here. Is there a blogging coach we can hire????

I didn't mean it the way it came out :P

Hey Gadget man! what an incredible tool!! I loved to be graded...keeps you in check. Can't wait to be able to use this.

Hot damn! Here I am at 10:30pm on a Friday night, poking around the web wondering what in the world am I going to do with my blog, and you've gone and given me the road map. What a prince!

Strangely enough, I am quite pleased with the results, as I've done zero except post. This gives me mucho mucho hope.

Oh yeah, about that 9th grade reading level... that's harsh! LOL

Wow,

Did my sites fail, no wonder I'm not getting more traffic. Thanks, I think....

Wow...Jay did on my Realtown blog...he said it was pretty good. I'm not sure what pretty good means so I think I need to figure out how to make it better.

Jeff,

Thanks for the info. I found this to be very valuable and I am currently working to improve my site. Have a great weekend.

Jeff,

Thanks for the info. I found this to be very valuable and I am currently working to improve my site. Have a great weekend.

Thanks for more invaluable information. Trying to keep up with work and finding time to implement some of these great idea is proving challenging at this time; so I have bookmark some stuff to go back to when I have more time. Thank you for sharing.

This is very cool. I just put in my website and it scored 50/100, I was very surprised. It said something about trying hubspot.com to improve your site have you tried this. Just curious. Thanks. SC

Jeff ~ Very cool stuff. I see the Active Rain domain expires in less than two years. The Gods better anty up a few bucks so it doesn't expire! :)

I have no idea where they come up with the Advanced Degree stuff...on Active Rain? Obviously they are not tuned into MY blog! :)

APR

2007

Well you will need a freakin Graduate Degree to read my blog apparently! Oh, my website too. One would think that reading at that level would net you a better score. HA!

So, I sit for hours polishing what I write, sweating over not wanting it to sound stupid or illiterate only to be told to dumb it down. Well, that is just great! All I can think about is the many hours of sleep lost to sweating when I could have done better by leaving it dumb? What a friggin world!

Just cant win.

Laurie, don't forget that's a very generic grader using a very basic algorithm. As a rule of thumb, it may be right, but if your audience is smarter or more specific I don't think that's a problem at all. I don't know what the Bloodhound Blog scores (that Jeff writes for) but it's certainly one of the more articulate blogs out there and it breaks a lot of the 'rules'. And regardless of how it scores in that regard, it enjoys a huge readership - so keep sweating and don't compramise. Or to put it in the language of a 10th grader (hey, algorithm! get your 1's and 0's around this): "Yo, ain't no need to be so dumb, a'ight dawg?"

Laurie... LOL... these tools are good for making comparisons between sites. I wouldn't alter your style to make an attempt to lower your reading level score. I was surprised that Julie's was at 11th grade. Not because she's not bright, but because her writing style seemed to contradict that rating. So I just went back and took a different look. I did notice one thing long run on sentences can be difficult to read. I had no idea what impact that would have on the readability score, but I thought it was worth a few minutes. So what I did with some of Julie's posts is go shorten just a few sentences by making them into two sentences. The content didn't change, just the structure of the sentence.

Marcus... you are correct. These graders us a very basic algorithm. But they are great for making comparisons. Much can be learned. By the way, I don't write for Bloodhound Blog anymore. I chose to leave a few weeks ago. But you would expect sites like Bloodhound Blog and Rain City Guide to score very well on this, since they are so heavily visited and popular. So, I ran the grader on them using one keyword - real estate.

Rain City Guide: 95/100 overall, 87/100 compared to other business blog websites, Google PageRank of 6, high number of meta-keywords , 2760 Google indexed pages, 1830 inbound links on Google, 68,825 on Yahoo, readability level - 11th grade. Link to full report

Bloodhound Blog: 85/100 overall, 73/100 compared to other business blog websites, Google PageRank of 5, missing meta-keywords and page description in the meta-data, 1480 Google indexed pages, 1970 inbound links on Google, 27,299 on Yahoo, readability level - 11th grade. Link to full report

That is exactly what I would have expected and I think you'd agree, anyone would be happy to have either of these blogs' level of success. As I said in the beginning, much of the score improvement comes over time as you build content, and as an extension, build links in to your site. As Dustin Luther at Rain City Guide would say, "links are the currency of the web."

All... on the subject of readability. Here is a more specific link you can use that will help. Juicy Studio Readability Test. They do a fabulous job of explaining the algorithms. They concentrate on what is called the Gunning-Fog Index and gives some examples. Lower scores are more easily understood... that doesn't mean they are "dumbed down."

"The Gunning-Fog index is a rough measure of how many years of schooling it would take someone to understand the content. The lower the number, the more understandable the content will be to your visitors. Results over seventeen are reported as seventeen, where seventeen is considered post-graduate level."

Examples they site, Mark Twain and The Bible have a fog index of 6. The Wall Street Journal has a fog index of 11. Academic papers may have a fog index of 15 -20.

So, ran it on Julie's site: Average words per sentence:8.71. Percentage of words with three or more syllables: 11.28%. Average Syllables per word: 1.46. Gunning Fog Index: 8.00. Flesch Reading Ease: 74.08. Flesch-Kincaid Grade: 5.09

Comparison for Bloodhound Blog: Average words per sentence:9.59. Percentage of words with three or more syllables: 14.19%. Average Syllables per word: 1.53. Gunning Fog Index: 9.51. Flesch Reading Ease: 67.56. Flesch-Kincaid Grade: 6.22

And here is Turner's Perspective's score: Average words per sentence:9.04. Percentage of words with three or more syllables: 10.94%. Average Syllables per word: 1.45. Gunning Fog Index: 7.99. Flesch Reading Ease: 75.03. Flesch-Kincaid Grade: 5.04

And, before this comment becomes a post of its own, here is a link to everything you ever wanted to know about readability tests but were afraid to ask.

Update: I ran the report on Julie again this morning, just to see what might have happened overnight with web crawlers and the like and her score dropped. She has technorati ranking now. She did not have one yesterday. It is very low, so that could explain the drop. However... I'm fixated on this ONLY for this post and the changes we made. The changes we made will NOT impact Julie's daily life at all. They all will happen automatically on the back end of the site. The site is now better equipped to send information out to the web in a way the search engines want to see it.

Interesting tool, and thanks for following up in your comments with what changes you've made so far and how they improved results. Once the site reaches a certain level, is this something you would check weekly or monthly?

John, I probably will only check more often as a result of Project Blogger. I'm going to do it once a week, just for fun. Now that these fixes are in, the rest is really up to content, consistency, and links. I would not be fixated on it.

Jeff, what a great job you are doing with your mentoring. Fabulous results!

WOW, what a great tool. I tried it out and was astonished with the results. Thanks

One question why does it say there is no rss feed ? It said it on mine too and I thought we had one on activerain.

Jeff, thanks for the tip for looking at our blogs in a different (important) way. It's good to see our blogs from a different perspective and tweak it, tweak it, tweak it!

Jeff, Wow what a great tool - as a new blogger on Active Rain I got a 74/100 which may explain why consumers have started finding me. I was surprised the grade level was College+1? I think you may have hit on something with long sentences so I'm going to work on this. Keep it coming - I'm learning lots - continued thanks.

APR

2007

Gena... thank you.

Missy... if you're testing your AR blog, make sure you're entering the main blog link. In your case that is: http://activerain.com/blogs/missycaulk

Deborah... every little bit of info helps.

Cyndee... yes, AR blogs rate high because of the power of the group. For example Julie's AR blog [ http://activerain.com/blogs/julieferenzi ] which has little content, has a rating of 65/100, which is misleading, since it uses AR's overall Alexa Traffic Ranking of 8,560. That is NOT her specific blog ranking, but the overall AR site ranking. That said, it's one of the reasons why posts done in AR blogs get noticed by Google.

Thanks Jeff, when I changed how I searched it to what you suggested above instead of just activerain.com/missycaulk, I went from 55 to 71. I have not been using that on my signature so I will start to do that. You are so helpful, thanks. The google page rank 3 stayed the same. It now says it has a rss feed to where as before it did not.

Font Tags Found in HTML

The website seems to be using font tags in the HTML. Although this is not a critical issue, most web experts would advise using cleaner XHTML/CSS for websites instead of using non-semantic markup tags like the font tag.

This website contained about 11 font tags.

What is this?? How do I change it? It must be a big deal it says it everywhere I put a URL in I use.

Missy, the usual culprit for this is writing your posts in a program outside of your blog and then copying and pasting the content into your blog post. If you are using Word or some other program to write your posts, it is possible you are bringing in the font tags from the word document. You can see these font tags by looking at the code. Or you could be copying information from another website, like your mls. This post, http://activerain.com/blogsview/56039/Great-House-on-Quiet, appears to have been copied from content you posted at vFlyer and when I view the page source code it is filled with "div class=" markers that are specific to vFlyer and have nothing to do with the content.

As the report says, this is not a critical issue, but in the case above, there are more characters associated with information that is not relevant to the post than post informations. Example:

<div class="subItem">
<div class="subItemTitle">Pricing</div>

Pricing is the onlly thing in that string that means anything.  :)

This is what it would have looked like if the formating had been done inside the AR post itself:

pricing<br />

Jeff,

What a great tool! Mine also said I need to "dumb it down". Which I thought funny!

Thanks Jeff, I only write in activerain, except for reports I have to put in wordpress so they link here.

I do use vflyer and the blog you referenced was straight from there as well as some widgets. I appreciate you taking the time to answer so I know what they are talking about. Keep us the good work, you are helping alot of us.

APR

2007

Jeff -

Thanks for using our free SEO tool (Website Grader) in your article. All of us at HubSpot are very proud of that product. Of course we are proud of our other Internet marketing products as well, but Website Grader has been getting a lot of traction lately - we have now graded over 10,000 websites.

Thanks!

Mike Volpe
HubSpot

Paula... go check out this links for more information on readability: Juicy Studio Readability Test and everything you ever wanted to know about readability tests but were afraid to ask. :)

Missy... truly my pleasure.

Mike, thank you for monitoring this and for stopping by to add your comments. You've built a great tool!

I like the way you used "free SEO tool" in your link above. :)

APR

2007

Jeff, loved the grader. Once again reminded me of some unfinished projects for my "other blog" Synergy Thoughts. According to the grader I, like many of the commenters above, have to pay closer attention.

Steve, i hear ya. I'm guessing you're like me. Lots of balls in the air and only two hands. Nice cigar.

APR

2007

I am happy to report progress on improving Julie's blog score:

WebSite Grade For http://www.livinginplainfield.com/ : 71/100 (overall)

A website grade of 71 for http://www.livinginplainfield.com/ means that of the thousands of websites that have previously been submitted to the tool, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 71% 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.

The software is constantly being upgraded and the algorithm enhanced. The number of potential recommendations provided by the tool is also increasing frequently. Please check back often.

Compared To Other Business Blog Websites : 60/100

Type Specific Score: http://www.livinginplainfield.com/
When compared to other Business Blog websites, http://www.livinginplainfield.com/ scored a 60/100. This means that it is has a higher score than 60 of the Business Blog websites that have been processed by the system.

APR

2007

WOW!! What a fantastic improvement! And in such a short time. Congrats!!

Any way possible I can pick your brain about my blog. I used the website grader tool yesterday and it discovered some "errors" and I am not sure where to go from here. My personal blog is NorthTacomaLiving.com (if you want to use the grading tool yourself to see what I am talking about). I use Google to write my posts and copy and paste from there. I have link problems even though I swear I did permanently direct. I don't know. This is the over my head part that I get frustrated about. :)

Thanks!

APR

2007

Debi... OK, I took a quick look for you. Here are the major dings.

Meta-Keywords Not Found
Search Words Missing In Title
Page Description Not Found

I used "real estate" as the only keyword in this analysis. So, the search word missing in item two is real estate. The other two issues are related and can only be rectified if you are using Advanced Templates on typepad. There are plugins for Wordpress that make this painless. Doing so in Typepad is a bit more involved. This is from TypePad's Suppor Knowledge Base, Adding Meta Tags with Advanced Templates. So, take a look at the article. If it makes sense and you think you can do it, go for it. If not, you may need to find or hire someone who can do it for you. Hope that helped!

APR

2007

Jeff- Thank you very much for taking the time to look at my blog. Sounds like I should have gone with a Wordpress blog platform. :( I will check out the article you linked. Thanks again. I appreciate it greatly!

APR

2007

Debi... TypePad is a very popular blogging platform and my wife uses it for her blog, so you didn't make a bad choice. Far from it. See if you can get some of the items fixed and just keep writing! :)

APR

2007

I'm the developer of WebsiteGrader.com.

I'd like to thank everyone that has stopped by and tried out the tool (and all the positive comments).

Though we haven't actually "launched" the software yet (it's in beta), the positive response has been phenomenal.

We just posted a major new update to the software today, so if you might want to revisit and try it out again. Even more good stuff now.

Regards,

Dharmesh

MAY

2007

Dharmesh... thank you for stopping by and for letting us know about the changes. I just went and took a look. Nice changes. I've got to do some research on Julie's competitors in her area so we can use that feature. Nicely done!

MAY

2007

Hi, you have a great blog here! I'm definitely going to bookmark you!

I have a <a href="http://www.internetrealestatecenter.com/blog/"> Internet Real Estate Marketing Site</a> blog. It covers strategies for the Real

Estate Investor that wants to learn the tools and knowledge they need in order to successfully expand their Internet Real Estate Marketing and

grow their profits by Buying and Selling Real Estate Online. Discover The Proven Internet Marketing Strategies, Tools, and Free Resources You

Need To Start, Promote & Grow Your Real Estate Investing Online!

Come and check it out if you get time :-)

MAY

2007

Mark... that's one way to get yourself linked from other sites. Thanks for the introductory compliment. :)

MAY

2007

Debi Braulik... I just looked inside TypePad again and they have two new features. Click on Configure > Publicity. They have recently added a Google Sitemap, you will want that to be ON. And they have added a place for Meta Keywords and Descriptions. Add them there and click save changes... Should help a great deal!

MAY

2007

Jeff- Thank you. I visited my Typepad site and tweaked it as you suggested. I am having so many problems with my Typepad site. Maybe since you are so techno savvy you could do a comparison of features post (Wordpress vs. Typepad) so other newbies do not get sucked into a blog platform they do not like or cannot deal with. (I thought I was fairly techno savvy but this whole mapping, forwarding, cname, etc thing is about to break me.)

Thanks again!

Debi... check out some of these links:

http://www.google.com/search?q=typepad+vs+wordpress

I think you're suggestion is a good one and I've added it to my list. There may be those in the Wordpress group who have done this already as well. I will check.

MAY

2007

Jeff (and friends).

A few quick notes on WebsiteGrader to answer some of the questions:

1. The tool checks for a "discoverable" RSS feed on the web page. So, it's possible that there's a feed, but it's not discoverable. By being discoverable, browsers like FireFox will show an orange feed icon right next to the URL making it easy for users to subscribe. This is considered best practice.

2. The readability grade is a coarse approximation. I would not read to too much into it (and certainly not advise rewriting content based on it).

3. Font tags in the web page are not a big issue. Although I flag this in the report, it does not impact the actual final grade. You are right that when people cut/paste content from things like Word, it will pull over some font tag ugliness through.

If anyone has any questions, please feel free to ask. Will do my best to respond.

JUN

2007

Dharmesh... thank you for stopping by. Your site continues to improve. Thank you for stopping by to answer some of the questions in this comment stream.

As an update... Julie's LivingInPlainfield.com blog continues to improve, though we've made no changes since that first day. As I said in the post, most of this just comes with time. No need to worry, if you're on a good blog platform and you are writing consistently.

WebSite Grade For www.livinginplainfield.com : 84/100 (overall)

A website grade of 84 for www.livinginplainfield.com means that of the thousands of websites that have previously been submitted to the tool, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 84% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness.

Jeff - that is so impressive - So happy to see all yours and Julie's hard work paying off. It gives us all hope. Thanks for all you do and share.

JUN

2007

Cyndee... thanks. I know others in the competition have done an equally good job of getting their grade up into the B grade level. Our goal is to get that score up above 90. :)

JUL

2007

I have used website grader several times after reading this post.Is there a contact email for Dharmesh Shah to request specific information?

JAN

2009

I've continuted to monitor my site and I'm only up to a grade of 66. A whole lot better than before but not where I want to be. TriangleNCHomes4Sale is my url.

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Jeff Turner

Santa Clarita, CA

More about me…

Real Estate Shows

Office Phone: (661) 244-5812

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Jeff Turner helps people grow their business through the effective use of emerging technologies. I am the President of Zeek Interactive and Founder of RealEstateShows.com. Father of 6. Husband of 1.

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