For a little over a year now I’ve been using Hubspot’s Twitter Grader to measure my Twitter “score.” While Twitter obviously isn’t a race (although some will lead you to believe that it is) this online tool helps measure influence, track followers and other stats. Combined with other tools like Twitalyzer, you can get a pretty good idea of your influence and whether or not there are things that you need to improve to make yourself more noticeable on Twitter.

I kind of went off on a tangent there…

Like I said, I’ve been using Hubspot’s Twitter Grader for awhile now and it got me using their Website Grader as well. This grader takes numerous things into account to give your website a rough score out of 100. While it’s not perfect, it does give you a good idea of things that you need to improve on with your website like your SEO, content, images, etc.

The grading system is split into five main categories, each with their own sub-categories which give you a more in depth analysis. The categories are:

I. Create Content

• Blog Analysis
• Blog Grade
• Recent Blog Articles
• Google Indexed Pages
• Readability Level

II. Optimize

• Metadata
• Heading Summary
• Image Summary
• Interior Page Analysis
• Domain Info
• MOZ Rank
• Last Google Crawl Date
• Inbound Links

III. Promote

• del.icio.us Bookmarks
• Link Tweet Summary
• Twitter Grade
• Google Buzz Count

IV. Convert

• RSS Feed
• Conversion Form

V. Analyze

• Traffic Rank
• Score Summary
• Historical Data Available

The system isn’t perfect but it gives you a good idea of what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong and also gives you a good idea of what search engines are looking for as well as users. The site doesn’t leave you hanging with just a score, it gives you tips on how to improve the different aspects of your site as well. If you have a blog on your site, check out their Blog Grader as well for tips and tricks on how to increase the visibility of your blog.

I’ve been using the Website Grader for a little over a year now and it has helped me understand a bit more about visibility of websites. My initial grade was a somewhere in the low 30s but I’ve managed to increase it to a 77. It’s not something that I’m obsessing over but it’s nice to see it increase.

Good friend and photographer, Nick Forret, approached me in early July about relaunching his website and I was more than happy to help him out. Nick’s old website, while nice looking, wasn’t set up to be easily edited by Nick who has little coding background. Our solution was to set up his new site using WordPress which let him easily update his website and even keep a blog. The new site is set up to automatically add Lightbox to his uploaded images, thus creating a bit of a fancy gallery for his users to view his work.

We’ve also set up a blog with comments enabled to promote discussion about various topics.

Nick is still in the process of adding content to the site but you can view the active site here:
http://www.nickforret.com

Don’t forget, Nick is always available for work!