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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Originally published Jul 15, 2009 7:17:00 AM, updated October 20 2016

Topics:

Blog Optimization