Aside from the usual Blog Rankings, a way to gauge the progress of your blog's path to success is through its marketing effectiveness.
Marketing effectiveness is the quality of how marketers go to market with the goal of optimizing their spending to achieve good results for both the short-term and long-term. Wikipedia
In blogging, the principle is almost the same. The marketers are the readers/searchers. The market is the blogosphere. Their goal is to optimize their time to find the exact information they need in the fastest, most effective way possible.
There are several ways to determine your blog's marketing effectiveness. Websitegrader measures and explains each.
Website Grader Overview.
Website Grader is a free seo tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.This Blog's Website Grade and Report.
Let's take this blog as an example.Grade.
Report.
View This Blog's Full ReportWebsiteGrader's Algorithm.
WebsiteGrader's algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over 50 different variables, including search engine data, website structure, approximate traffic, site performance and others. To be more specific, here are major variables used:(1) On-Page SEO
(2) Off-Page SEO
(3) Blogosphere
(4) Social Mediasphere
(5) Converting Qualified Visitors to Leads
(6) Competitive Intelligence
Let's take a closer look at each point.
On-Page SEO.
On-Page SEO is the process of placing your selected keywords in the right places on your web pages. When we say keywords, these are the words used by web surfers to describe what they hope to find when performing a Web search. Choosing the right keyword to use for your blog is one of the biggest factor in attaining your website's visibility in the search engines/internet. This involves changing page titles, headings, content, and URLs to improve search engine rankings.(a) Metadata.
Metadata tags allow you to tell the search engines what your web page is about. Once you defined what type of information you'd like the search engines to know about your website, place these meta tags right inside your document head. Below is the format:
<head>
<meta name='Description' content='type your website's description here' />
<meta name='Keywords' content='type your keywords here' />
</head>
Guidelines.
Maximum number for meta description: 150 characters
Maximum number for meta keywords: 10 keywords
To learn more, check out: Understanding the Magic of Meta-Data.
(b) Heading Summary.
The headings being referred here are the h1, h2, h3 tags that are embedded on your website.These heading tags help search engine spiders better understand the content on a page and what is most important. In blogs, headings are most commonly used in: (1) widget titles like Labels, Blog Archive, Recent Posts, Blogroll; (2) post titles(c) Image Summary.
Images are a great way to enhance a website from a user's perspective. But since search engine crawlers cannot "see" images, alt attributes may be assigned to each picture to define its textual content. Below is the format:
<img src="enter image URL here" alt="type keyword or image description here">
(d) Interior Page Analysis.
WebsiteGrader looks at a few other pages on the website to see how well they are optimized. In blogs, if your site contains navigational menu, the menu's landing pages are the ones being analyzed for optimized keywords or description.(e) Readability Level.
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.Off-Page SEO.
Off-Page SEO includes all the things you do to promote your website outside the design of the website itself. Getting more inbound links to your site, registering with directories relevant to your industry, and getting more pages into the search engine indexes are all parts of Off-Page SEO.(a) Domain Info.
The principle here is that the longer your domain is registered, then the longer its age is. Since search engines consider domain "stability" when looking at the website's pages, this also serves as an indicator that the website is not a temporary spam site.(b) Google Page Rank.
Here's Google's quick note about PR or Page Rank.In short, getting links from high authority, relevant sites is one of the most effective way in improving your site's rank. But then, also consider the "outbound" (or outgoing) links these relevant sites have as this also has an impact on ranking. Quick example: Which is better to get links from? Page A that has PR of 5 but with 250 outbound links? or Page B that has PR of 2 but with only 10 outbound links?
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.
To learn more, check out: The Importance of Google PageRank, A Guide For Small Business Executives
Personal Suggestion: It would be nice if they could also consider stats from other Ranking Tools such as the Trifecta of SEOMoz.
(c) Google Indexed Pages and (d) Last Google Crawl Date.
This number (i.e. google indexed pages) is the approximate number of the website's pages that have been stored in the Google index. Quick tip on blogs: The more often you update your blog, the better. This is because search engine spiders love to crawl new and updated content.To manually check the number of your website's indexed site, go to Google. On the search bar, type:
site:yourdomain.com
To check when was the last time Googlebot crawled your site, go to Mypagerank.net's Googlebot last access
To learn how to make your blog search engine friendly, visit How To Make Your Blog Search Engine Friendly.
Personal Suggestion: It would be great if they could add other search engine stats such as those of Yahoo and MSN.
(e) Traffic Rank.
This is basically your Alexa Rank.To improve your alexa rank and overall traffic, visit:
20 Quick Ways to Increase Your Alexa Rank
Increasing My Blog's Traffic
21 Tactics to Increase Your Site's Traffic
(f) Inbound Links.
This is the number of links that link to your site. Having links from authoritative resources on the Internet helps you rank higher in search engines since these links are an indication that your website is trustworthy and contains good content.To manually check the number of your website's inbound links, go to Google or Yahoo or MSN. On the search bar, type:
To learn more about getting inbound links or most commonly known as backlinks, check out Did You Graduate From Link Building High School Yet?
link:yourdomain.com
(g) DMOZ Directory.
DMOZ, The Open Directory Project, is the largest and most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors. The secret here is that you MUST submit your site to the most relevant, most specific category where it should fall under.To learn more, visit: Quick Way to Get Listed in DMOZ.org
(h) Yahoo Directory.
The Yahoo! Directory is a web directory which rivals the DMOZ Open Directory Project in size. WebsiteGrader recommends that every business have a listing in the Yahoo! Directory.To submit your blog to Yahoo Directory listing, visit this link.
(i) Zoom Info.
ZoomInfo is a business directory and search engine, with profiles on more than 37 million people and 3.5 million companies.To submit your business blog/site to Zoom Info, go to Zoom Info website..
Blogosphere.
WebsiteGrader measures your website's visibility to the blogosphere. This variable scales your blog ranking in terms of Technorati authorities and reactions. This also outputs information such as the date when the last post was published, list of recent blog articles and their respective inbound links and number of diggs.This metric is especially helpful for websites that are not yet blog-oriented. To learn why Businesses should consider Blogging as a marketing campaign, check out: 6 Reasons Every Small Business Should Be Blogging.
Quick Note: WebsiteGrader needs to update its "Dugg" Output information to yield exact results.
Personal Suggestion: It would be wonderful if they could also integrate other media statistics like those of StumbleUpon's.
Social Mediasphere.
This pertains to the Social Marketing presence of the website in terms of social bookmarks, networks and media. At the moment, the sites included in their algorithm are: delicious and digg.To improve your social media visibility, submit your blog to the top social media sites.
Converting Qualified Visitors to Leads.
Visitors are good but you need to convert them to interested visitors so as to make them come back to your site regularly. Websitegrader has two major approach on this: through RSS feed and web forms.(a) RSS Feeds.
RSS is the newer, fresher means of promoting and marketing your website. Having one for your website helps a great deal, SEO included.
RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication" and it's intention is to allow people to share content across the internet easily and effectively. CommunitySEO
A good friend posted great info about RSS. Check out his post: RSS, Success in Directory Form.
(b) Conversion Form.
This is basically web forms that help the visitor contact or get in touch with you. Placing web forms such as feedback, suggestion, contact are valuable tools in attaining conversion.Competitive Intelligence.
What's great about WebsiteGrader is that, you can actually compare your statistics with your competitor.(a) Keyword Grader.
This shows your targetted keywords, estimated monthly search volume plus your website's rank on the specified word. Here's mine.
View Full Size
(b) Score Summary.
This displays your website grade, page/alexa/technorati ranks, number of google's indexed pages/backlinks, and delicious bookmarks.(c) Historical Data Available.
You can easily keep track the progress of your website's grade through this feature. To learn more, visit this link.So, wanna know your website's grade? If that's affirmative, visit Website Grader and start improving your blog's marketing campaign. ^_^
Thanks to Tehsplink where I initially found the widget, and to this Internet Marketing site where I learned that I could use this tool to find out if my blog is optimized for internet marketing and SEO.
Resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_effectiveness
http://www.marketingterms.com/dictionary/keyword/
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/29/SEO-For-Small-Business-Executives-Understanding-The-Magic-Of-Meta-Data.aspx
http://htmlescape.compender.com/2008/01/raymonds-html-escaper.html
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/45/The-Importance-of-Google-PageRank-A-Guide-For-Small-Business-Executives.aspx
http://mypagerank.net/service_gbla_index
http://www.bloggingwithsuccess.net/2008/11/how-to-make-your-blog-search-engine.html
http://www.doshdosh.com/20-quick-ways-to-increase-your-alexa-rank/
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/21-tactics-to-increase-blog-traffic
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/4334/Did-You-Graduate-From-Link-Building-High-School-Yet.aspx
http://pagerankblogs.com/2007/02/03/quick-way-to-get-listed-in-dmozorg/
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/1676/6-Reasons-Every-Small-Business-Should-Be-Blogging-Are-You-Missing-the-Boat.aspx
http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/social30
http://communityseo.com/forums/The-Importance-of-RSS-t150.html&view=findpost&p=209#entry209
http://ezinearticles.com/?RSS---The-Importance-of-RSS&id=569108
http://increasemyblogstraffic.blogspot.com/2008/11/rss-success-in-directory-form.html
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