Comments on: Grade Your Website: Free Online Evaluation Tools

By: CMS

CMS — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 10:54:42 +0000

The SEO grader on this site is still in beta testing and will continue to be worked on through May 2011. I thank everyone for the support in making this seo grader tool so great and keep checking back for more updates. We hope to continue grading your websites and providing useful SEO tips in order to optimize your keywords to the top of the search engines.

By: Mike Nolls

Mike Nolls — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 09:37:49 +0000

Great post, some good tools to use. Helped me speed up my site

By: zamir

zamir — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:41:29 +0000

Thanks a million for these very important and useful tools that is very helpful especially for new bloggers like me.

By: Alaska Web Design

Alaska Web Design — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 05:32:23 +0000

Superb! these tools are very thorough. I just learned more about my site in the past 10 minutes than I’ve learned in a year.

Thanks.

By: Velvet Blues

Velvet Blues — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 13:26:51 +0000

@Raju: Yes, I just validated your site. Those ‘errors’ are pretty common. And no, they won’t restrict the crawlings of Google.

My last sentence meant that there are plenty of sites that have lots of errors, yet rank well and get a lot of traffic from Google. (Great example: Ebay.com, try running that through the validator.)

By: Raju

Raju — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 12:49:19 +0000

Your last line again confused me (“Of course, there are many well-ranked websites that have horrible code!”). Why i am asking so many times is, when I tried to validate my theme on W3C I got around 30 errors. most of them relates to using “&” instead of “&” etc. I don’t think these things will restrict the crawlings of Google bots.

By: Velvet Blues

Velvet Blues — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 00:58:51 +0000

@Dennis: Yeh, there are some great tools out there.

By: Dennis Edell

Dennis Edell — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 22:10:53 +0000

Excellent lineup Shirley, I didn’t know half existed!

By: Velvet Blues

Velvet Blues — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 21:28:23 +0000

@Raju: Yes, perhaps I should have been more explicit. Here are some reasons:

1. That tool points out things that hurt seo, ie. same color text and background. Google might penalize a site for this offense.
2. Fewer errors ensure that search engines can more efficiently crawl it. (ie. If you incorrectly use tags, you might find that search engines may index it as content, not HTML.)
3. Proper use of tags ensure proper ranking/indexing of content. (ie. lists, code, addresses, etc… There are HTML tags for just about everything.) It also makes certain content more visible. For example, standards mandate the use of an image’s alt tag. And as Google tells us, it uses this tag for determining what the image is about.

Of course, there are many well-ranked websites that have horrible code!

By: Raju

Raju — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 21:16:24 +0000

Thanks for the quick reply, I understand the accessibility aspect of it but how SEO is affected? How bad is too bad? or even 1 error means lower SEO?

By: Velvet Blues

Velvet Blues — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 21:02:34 +0000

@Raju: That is a very good question. I actually wrote an article on it. There are three main reasons for validating your code: accessibility, cross-browser compliance, and search engine optimization.

By: Raju

Raju — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 20:57:34 +0000

How important is it to get the site validated from w3c? I really want to know.

By: Velvet Blues

Velvet Blues — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 19:36:21 +0000

@Nihar: Thanks. And feel free to share any great tools you know of.

@Ben: The only thing that is bad about the tool is that for websites that do have a lot of traffic and links, it may give you a false sense of security because it seems like you don’t have much to work on. But regardless of ‘score’, each website has many things that can be done to improve it.

@Kurt: Have fun. You know, I’d like to find one massive tool which does all tests at once.

By: Kurt Avish

Kurt Avish — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 16:18:40 +0000

Very nice list of tools. Thanks for sharing. Got some tests to do then

By: Ben Pei

Ben Pei — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 13:40:08 +0000

Yeah Shirley, sometimes they update a few times in a week. Sometimes not even once a month. But website grader is constant about it so I love it. Yeah the score they show is always 9x.

By: Nihar

Nihar — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 12:05:59 +0000

Thanks shirley. You have covered lot of tools here. I know few of them but donno know few of them. WIll check it out.

By: Velvet Blues

Velvet Blues — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 12:04:29 +0000

@stratos: Thanks. And I just linked to the post that has a list of value calculators… I guess that covers every topic.

@Kim: Glad I could help. lol. Yeh, back in 2005, I had a client who was crazy about web standards. And ever since, I have been pretty crazy about them too.

@Ben: Yes, website grader is one of my favorites. That nice little score makes you feel good, and the helpful tips are indeed useful. And I like knowing the Alexa rank before it is updated. After all, it seems like Alexa only gets around to updating ranks once a month!

By: Ben Pei

Ben Pei — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 08:52:12 +0000

I have been tracking my blog stats with website grader. They are really quite detailed about your seo effort and also manages to provide an updated alexa ranking.

By: Kim Woodbridge

Kim Woodbridge — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 01:40:07 +0000

Great list of tools! And ugh – I know I’ve had errors in my code forever and I keep meaning to fix it. How come every time I visit your site, Shirley, things get added to my todo list? LOL

By: stratosg

stratosg — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 19:56:06 +0000

you covered the thing from pretty much every aspect. one more i would add is value meters that give you the price that your site is worth. nice collection of sites though!