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Kyle’s Cove and Website Grader

on June 7, 2007 in ShanKri-la, Tech for Life, WordPress

One of my recent adds to my daily read section in my feed reader is Kyle’s Cove. Kyle authors his technology blog and I find Kyle's Cove - Technology Blog it very resourceful just in the few days I have been following and earned his way into our Blogroll. If you like ShanKri-la’s content, I am sure you will like Kyle’s Cove as I find our interests very similar and hopefully yours too.

Browsing through his site, I am inspired to create a reference page with links (he has a great section of links to guides & tutorials) to stuff that I look up often. I am yet to iron out how I want to organize that. I also like his way of having Blogroll in a separate page nicely categorized. I think it’s more informative that way to a reader than if it was just a long list of links.

Kyle has today posted about a great tool called Website Grader which I think every blogger should run by every now and then, like doing a quick health check. I know I am going to be doing atleast once every 2 weeks. At least as long as it is free (which it might end soon).

Website Grader - Grade your blog! What does Website Grader tell me?

  • Score: It showed me a quick score telling how I scored compared to all the other (35,000) sites that were submitted by a proprietary algorithm that takes into account like Google pagerank, traffic, website structure, etc. ShanKri-la scored 74.
  • Google PageRank: ShanKri-la ranks 3 right now.
  • Web Page structure: It identified that ShanKri-la didn’t have Meta keywords. Kyle has suggested a few WordPress plugins to address that.
  • Domain info: I have been wanting to dig through my emails to see when it expired since I knew it was coming up. But, this quickly showed me when it was up. Also, it seems it might be bad in a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) sense to have your domain name expiring within a year! May be I’ll renew it for 2 years this time.
  • Heading Summary: In my current theme, looks like my post titles are H3 and if I remember right a search engine friendly theme would have them as H2. (or am I day dreaming?)
  • Image Summary: It reinforced my habit of using an ‘alt’ tag for images as those can be seen by search engines. I miss this basic feature in ScribeFire firefox extension for blogging though.
  • Google Indexed Pages: I am guilty of overlooking this basic fact. I haven’t generated a sitemap and submit to Google yet! As a result, the only Google Page is indexing in ShanKri-la is the home page! No wonder I have only gotten like 20 search engine hits in the last 3 months. :-( I have to get this done this weekend.
  • Others: The report also shows Technorati rankings (45,559), number of people bookmarked me in del.icio.us (8), Alexa ranking (412,236) and readability level (5th grade – I wonder how many 5th graders are really reading this :-) .

I hope, by taking a look under the hood of ShanKri-la, it makes you want to take a peek into your website and improve it.

If you subscribe to ShanKri-la’s feed, you might not notice what’s going on at the site but the visitors here might notice some changes as I play with new themes in the coming weeks. As I have mentioned before, I am looking to add some unobtrusive advertisements to monetize ShanKri-la. May be it will get me beer money or at least I’ll learn how not to do it.

I thank all the readers for giving me the motivation to do keep going and it’s worth the effort even if it helps one person. Even if you subscribe, do stop by and leave a comment once in a while as it would be great to know my readers and put a face to you.

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  • http://www.kylescove.com Kyle Eslick

    Thanks for the mention! You really are only a few plugins away from fixing most of those problems. That is the power of WordPress! ;)

  • http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.yochitosway.de Rene

    Thanks for the WebsiteGrader tip. I have been looking for a way to see how my websites do and this was exactly what I was looking for. Cheers!

  • http://www.2dolphins.com/2007/05/low-tech-learning-leaps-ahead.html Rob O.

    Hey, I’m diggin’ the Website Grader. It already helped me identify and correct a problem – I had neglected to implement a 301 redirect for incoming hits without the “www” prefix.

    It’s the first page checker I’ve run that has had a problem with the number (20) of META keywords. Does this seem like too much or is Website Grader just being a little too conservative?

  • http://www.websitegrader.com Dharmesh Shah

    Hi there. I’m the developer of Website Grader. Thanks for the mention! I’m glad some of you are finding it somewhat useful.

    Rob O.: Website Grader is indeed being a bit conservative when it comes to recommendations (like the number of keywords in the meta-data). However, in my mind, for things that are easy to fix, it’s not worth the risk of being penalized by Google.

    For example, if there’s even a small chance that Google will use the number of keywords in the meta-data as a “signal” that a certain site is a spam site (i.e. “Made For AdSense”) with very little content of value, there’s very little upside to taking this risk. You’re better off reducing the number of keywords.

    We’re constantly improving the tool, so feel free to revisit and let me know if you have any ideas for improvement.

  • http://www.shankrila.com K-IntheHouse

    Kyle.. I started using WordPress after trying b2evolution to keep track of my work notes.. :-) And it’s been a love affair ever since!

    Rene! It was Kyle who actually wrote about this.. so thanks to him!

  • http://www.shankrila.com K-IntheHouse

    I missed to mention that, Rob. I need to install the redirect plugin to address that.

    I’m not sure how many Metawords is too many. I’ll definitely ping you if I find out about it this weekend. Cheers!

  • http://www.shankrila.com K-IntheHouse

    Dharmesh, thanks for stopping by and clarifying Rob’s question. It really helps to know.

    Plus, this tool is really helpful for beginners and experts alike to take a quick look at these metrics.

    ps: Your comment was in the moderation queue and just released it. :-)

  • http://www.2dolphins.com/2007/05/low-tech-learning-leaps-ahead.html Rob O.

    Not sure if this is the most appropriate place to pose this question, but in my META tags, I have “dolphin” and the plural form “dolphins.” Likewise, I have”adopt” and “adoption.” Are these redundant? Does the addition of these alternate forms of the same word serve any real purpose or am I needlessly padding my META tag count?

    Thanks for the speedy response, Dharmesh!

  • http://www.brownbaron.com/blog/ Brown Baron

    Seems like a good tool for fast checking your blog’s performance. I like it.

  • http://www.websitegrader.com Dharmesh Shah

    Rob: Opinions vary, but a couple of quick points:

    1. Meta-data keywords are not nearly as important any more like they used to be (it is suspected that Google doesn’t use them at all). Yahoo! and others likely still do look at them, but weight them relatively low.

    2. Common consensus seems to be that variations of words don’t automatically get picked up (so you should specify common variations right within the meta-data).

    But, this is just one guy’s opinion.

  • http://blog-op.com/google-sitemaps-essential/ Chris

    I’m off to check out that grader straight away, sounds like a brilliant tool.

    K mate, you need a sitemap right now-just get that plugin and you’ll be off and running, most of my posts get indexed by Google in hours because of it.

  • http://blog-op.com/google-sitemaps-essential/ Chris

    And now I’m back, 93/100 wasn’t bad, what a cool website :-)

  • http://blogaboutyourblog.com Matthew

    website grader was pretty interesting, thanks for posting about that!

    looks like my redirect isnt there anymore for some odd reason

  • http://www.shankrila.com K-IntheHouse

    Brown.. Kyle over at Kyle’s Cove mentioned it and I thought everyone here would like it too as kind of a first line of defense!

    Dharmesh.. thanks for sharing that. Its refreshing to hear someone saying things as it is than just touting every feature of their product.

    Chris, I am fixing that right after replying to all the comments. Great score.. I’ll see if mine gets better after fixing couple of easy ones.

    Mathew.. good to see you here! hope you got your redirect fixed now..

  • http://blog-op.com/do-you-know-your-blog-grade/ Do You Know Your Blog Grade? » Blog-Op

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  • http://www.eJabs.com Matthew Jabs

    Kyle & K: thanks for spotting this tool & brining it to our attention.

    Dharmesh: thanks a ton for coding this page, it’s great. Are you going to monetize it with ads or with registration fees? Or are you going to leave it free?

    K: I just checked your site & it looks like you haven’t installed the plugin for sitemaps yet. If this helps, here’s the link to the plugin. It’s in beta stage 7, but I’ve been using it for months with no problems.

  • http://www.eJabs.com Matthew Jabs

    Also, I wanted to thank you because it has brought several issues with my website to my attention.

    My score was originally 84, and after just a few minor changes it is currently at 93. As soon as I can get the authorization codes from my old domain registrar & transfer them, then renew them with my current webhosting company…my score should be up above 95!

    Thanks again!

  • http://www.eJabs.com Matthew Jabs

    K…let me know about the status of your ads.

  • Shankrila Admin

    Thats great Matt! My score is still low as I have renew my registration soon! Also, I have addresses most of them including Sitemaps.

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