Can you tell us a little bit about you and the team at Website Grader?
Website Grader is a free marketing and SEO tool built by an Internet Marketing company called HubSpot. I'm one of the co-founders and serve as the CTO, the other co-founder is our CEO Brian Halligan. Both of us, plus everyone else on the team, have a lot of experience building products for Internet marketing and using the Internet for marketing to build and grow a company.
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What is Website Grader exactly?
Website Grader is a free Internet marketing tool that performs an analysis of the marketing effectiveness of your website. Basically, it looks at your website in a pretty detailed way and gives you a score that shows how effective your site is for marketing your business. What's unique about Website Grader is that it measures your website on a relative basis compared to tens of thousands of other websites. More importantly, it gives you some very specific and customized advice on what to change about your website to make it more effective and score higher.
For instance, here is a link to a Website Grader report for BuyDomains. Notice that BuyDomains scores extremely well, in the top 1% of all the websites evaluated in fact. Nice work!
Thanks! How did you come up with the idea for Website Grader?
Well, for our company, HubSpot, we were actually doing a lot of this stuff manually. For each of our customers or potential customers, we were trying to measure the current Internet marketing capabilities they had and where exactly they should improve. So we would go out and find their Alexa rank, the number of inbound links, Google Page Rank, check their Page Title, and put all of that and more into a report. It got to be pretty tedious. So we started to automate it, and created the first version of Website Grader.
And then we thought, well, if we find this valuable, maybe other people will too. So we decided to put it out on the Internet and let others try it out.. That was about 4 months ago. Much to our amazement, lots of people found Website Grader useful and they told their colleagues and friends. As I write this, 41,648 unique websites have already been graded. What makes this particularly interesting is that as the tool grades more websites, it gets better since it uses a relative grading scale on over a dozen important marketing variables.
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OK. Fair enough. So, what do the Website Grader Reports most frequently recommend?
The two most frequent recommendations are really pretty simple.
- Get the Page Title, Keywords and Description right on your homepage. Over half of the 40,000 websites evaluated by Website Grader have problems with these essential elements of search engine optimization (SEO). All the Website Grader reports contain information about best practices for these essential fields including how long they should be and what types of content they should contain.
- Make sure your website has a 301 or permanent redirect. This is usually pretty simple to do, but most websites — again, more than half of the ones we've evaluated — do not do it correctly. For some sites this does not end up being a big factor, but it does create some risk and it is usually a simple enough fix that we really advise people to do it.
Any final advice for small business owners and marketing people on how to best use Website Grader?
Run a Website Grader report. It's free! Then do your best to follow the recommendations in the report and check your progress over time. Although a high website grade doesn't guarantee marketing success, we're confident that improving your score will improve the traffic to your website and help grow your business.
Visit WebSiteGrader.com
Engaging affordable specialists for basic business needs will allow you to focus on growing your business. BuyDomains customers have access to free business services consultations with experienced Business Specialists. If you would like to identify trusted, quality service providers so that you can focus on running and growing your business, give us a call: 866-944-8600 toll free, +1 781-839-2885, worldwide.
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Verisign reported 128 million domain names registered across all Top Level Domain Names (TLDs) Registrations increased 31 percent over the previous year and grew six percent over the fourth quarter of 2006.
Growth in Country Code Top Level Domain Names (ccTLDs) stood at 33 percent year over year, with five percent quarter over quarter.
Total .com registrations constitute the largest single TLD, with .de (Germany) and .net following. The .org TLD moved into the fourth slot, slightly ahead of .uk (United Kingdom).
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Many small business owners are aware of the benefits associated with email, but may not be clear on the best way to maximize results.
We've assembled some great resources on email messaging and management, below.
BuyDomains partner Constant Contact has an extensive Learning Center. They offer free webinars on a variety of topics, including:
And from ClickZ:
Consider the following basics when developing your email strategy:
- Develop an email schedule by quarter, and allot time in your schedule to create and deploy these communications (or find a writer to help you accomplish your email strategy)
- Keep your emails focused on problem solving or product differentiation: how will your prospective customer benefit from choosing your good or service over those of your competitors?
- Provide your audience with more than one way to respond to your offers: email, phone, website — different strokes for different folks
- Feature customer endorsements or success stories: validation from fellow consumers is powerful
- Offer a guarantee on your goods or services; minimize a potential consumers risk will allow them to engage with you more easily
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