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Website Grader is a free tool that measures the effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also gives you some basic and advance advice on how your website can be improved from a marketing perspective.

How to use WebsiteGrader
Using WebsiteGrader is simple. You type in your homepage URL and hit the “Generate Report” button. Within a few short minutes, you will be given a report that rates your website across several important factors. The report has informative summary headings to help you understand the data.

One of the ways their tool has helped me
At present, the jiveSYSTEMS homepages scores 96.5/100. We scored pretty highly from the start, but just a couple of weeks ago when we migrated servers; our 301 from non-www to www went down. If I didn’t check our website post-migration, it could have taken us a few days or more to realize that our 301 redirect stopped working [for no apparent reason]. A 301 redirect is used to move one URL to another URL permanently. The search engines do not penalize 301 redirects in the same way they do other types of redirects.

Even if you are not a coder WebsiteGrader is useful
Most likely, you (like me) are not a professional coder. Setting up a 301 in the .htaccess file is definitely a job for your webmaster. However, the knowledge is extremely useful. Here is why: when our 301 redirect from non-www to www went down, all the backlinks pointing to jivesystems.com (different than www.jivesystems.com, at least from a search algorithm point of view) were not giving us SEO credits. Our domain was literally split in two.

Additional insight
Don’t get caught up in getting your website a perfect score until you have a solid linkbuilding initiative in place. You can do this by hiring a SEO company that specializes in linkbuilding. You could also hire a few students to leave articulate comments on relevant blogs, or hiring a someone in-house.

Full Sail just launched several SEO/SEM and Social Media degree programs. If you give them a call, you might be able to snap-up an interm and/or higher a graduate student. Full Sail University has built a reputation as one of the premier media arts schools in the world. To the best of my knowledge, they were the first college to launch SEO/SEM and Social Media degrees.

The backbone of every SEO/SEM and Social Media campaign is content and backlinks.

Here is a link to Full Sail’s website, and another to the WebsiteGrader tool.

Afterword
Thank you for reading this post. I hope you find this information useful.  The only way I am going to know is if you leave a comment.  I am here to serve you.  My goal is to help you adjust to the evolving arena of marketing.  Please feel free to ask questions, leave praise , and also don’t hesitate to let me know how I can serve you better.  I am always looking to improve.  Just recently, I got an email from a client asking me to break things down into great detail.  Their insight was very helpful and I’m thankful for it.  This is because after reviewing some of my earlier posts, I realized I was taking my hours of study and practical application for granted.  Since my goal is to simplify and streamline your experience, I made the appropriate adjustments, and hopefully you like the results.

About the Author:

Will Franco is the CEO/Founder of jiveSYSTEMS (a video email marketing software and training company). He also runs an online community / membership group called AskFlywheel, in which he teaches cutting-edge online marketing strategies. His mantra at work is "Think-Automate: Do it, Automate it, Delegate it, or Ditch it"