Web Design Costa Blanca / SEO Spain

Want to know how to get your Website high up in natural search results, but don’t want to pay a search engine optimisation (SEO) firm just to find out what you are doing wrong? Now you can get a free, automated evaluation of your site on Website Grader.

Just type in your Website address, and it will spit out a report detailing what you can do to boost your site’s SEO juice. It even gives you a grade.

Just for fun, I typed in the WSJ.com and the NYTimes.com to get comparison stats. Both also scored a 99. But, as you’d expect, the NYTimes trounces the WSJ.com (and us) when it comes to PageRank, inbound links, and traffic. That is simply a function of being an open site versus a closed, subscription site like the WSJ.com.

Here are the comparison stats:

You can also view a Sample Report from Hubspot.

These figures really show the penalty the WSJ.com is taking by sticking to its subscription wall. Instead of a PageRank of 9 like the NYTimes.com. The traffic rank numbers are from Alexa, so I’d ignore them. The number of WSJ.com pages bookmarked on del.icio.us or indexed by Google is a tiny fraction of what it would be if it was a fully open site. Even if these numbers are not completely accurate, you get a sense of how much a better job the Wall Street Journal could be doing to make its articles visible to the outside world.

Website Grader is operated by HubSpot, a search engine and Web-marketing optimisation company hoping to get leads from the site. If you use it, don’t be surprised if you get contacted by one of its sales reps trying to upsell you to one of its paid services. Hey, you didn’t really think it was free, did you?