Since we're
launching Blog Grader
over at
blog.grader.com
this morning, today on this blog I'm sharing our report card.
So how we doin?
Right now
we get a B+ -- an 89 out of 100
.
I
think that's pretty good, especially considering that we're working
within the constraints of a company blog. Of course, there's a lot of
work to do.
To get a sense of exactly where that work needs to be
done -- and to give you a full status report on the blog -- I put our
grades in the context of some of the blogs we read regularly and admire:
Site
|
Blog Grade
|
Traffic Rank
|
Page Rank
|
Indexed Pages
|
Inbound Links
|
|
sethgodin.typepad.com
|
92
|
8,410
|
7
|
4,320
|
1,840,142
|
|
www.chrisbrogan.com
|
91
|
19,793
|
6
|
3,720
|
420,672
|
|
www.micropersuasion.com
|
91
|
52,023
|
7
|
5,750
|
595,266
|
|
blog.hubspot.com
|
88
|
6,535
|
5
|
1,150
|
46,385
|
|
www.toprankblog.com
|
88
|
17,980
|
6
|
3,340
|
785,905
|
|
www.copyblogger.com
|
87
|
8,717
|
6
|
930
|
801,510
|
|
www.webinknow.com
|
83
|
70,786
|
6
|
934
|
131,920
|
|
What's all this tell you? And what can you learn from it so that you can benchmark your own blog?
Above all, it shows that it doesn't make sense to judge your blog by a single metric. Look at a variety of metrics, and decide which are the most important for your purposes.
Here's a rundown of each of the metrics I've included above:
-
Traffic Rank
is important if you're concerned with the visitors
to your site, as many advertising-funded sites are. Lower is better.
-
Page Rank
is a very rough assment of raw SEO power, according to Google. It's on a 1-10 scale. Higher is better.
-
Indexed Pages
is a measure of the volume of content visible to search engines. More is better.
-
Inbound Links
is a rough proxy for SEO authority (search engines use inbound links to help sort results). It's also an indication of the extent to which your blog is used as a reference. A higher number is better.
Here are a few numbers that aren't listed above, but are also important:
-
Comments
indicate the level of engagement on the blog. Higher is better.
-
Subscriptions
indicate the level of the blog's reach. More subscriptions is better.
So which one of these numbers should you be focused on most? It depends
on what your blog's goals are, but I try to keep track of all of them
for this blog. Of course, now that we have a
Blog Grade
that weights
all of them, I'll be focusing more on that.
How's your report card? Which metrics are you focused on improving for your blog?
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