In yesterday's Nugget, we hoped to illustrate why it might be time to upgrade your website. In today's Daily Gold Nugget, we are giving you a common tool to measure the good, bad and ugly attributes of your website.
Navigate your web browser over to Website Grader at http://websitegrader.com and take a quick look at this tool. This website testing tool has been commonly used for several years by many jewelry trade show speakers and online experts when providing reviews of websites. It's also one of the tools we use in our own office.
On http://websitegrader.com type your website address into the "Website URL" box and click Generate Report.
They use 50 different measurements to calculate a scoring from 1 to 100, similar to the common school system grading in the USA.
Any score more than 90 means you've done a lot of SEO work on your website and have well above the national average of 45 visitors per day.
A score between 80-90 still indicates a website with some SEO work accomplished, but there is easy room for improvement according to the guidelines they offer in their report.
A score of 70-80 means you should take some time and really read and understand what they are recommending. There's a lot to learn.
If you have a score of 60-70 it's time to make some changes to your website and your overall website strategy. The report will indicate some basic things you can do to elevate yourself really fast, but at this low grade, you need to dedicate a full time employee to the project.
Sorry to say if you have a grade of less than 60, it's either because your website is 5 years out of date or because you have totally missed the idea of what a website is for. You have two choices: Hire a company to whip your site into shape or go out of business. Blunt. Sorry. But you should know by now that your @, fb, t and www are way more important than your phone number.
Website Grader frequently changes its methods of grading websites. No one really knows what makes a perfect website from an SEO point of view, so Website Grader uses commonly suspected metrics to measure your website's usefulness.
In addition to normal SEO stuff, the recent grades lean heavily toward blogging, Twittering, Bookmarking and Buzzing in Google. The shift away from SEO as a primary measure indicates that there is so much more happening with online internet marketing than just your website alone.
Just go ahead and try this Website Grader for yourself. Print the report and take your time to read it. Then take action. The ideas presented will be new, unthought-of concepts from when your website was first created.
One final comment: we were serious about the score of 60 or less. During this recession, our programming company Sapphire Collaborative (www.sapphirecollaborative.com) had more than 30 stores go out of business. Each of them had an older website created circa 2003-2004 and refused to keep it up-to-date. Jewelers who stayed in business were at least updating basic details (like store hours) on their site.
Tomorrow we will continue our discussion on website refreshing by measuring your website page speed.
