Grade Your Blog Here

Blog Grade for astroblogging.net/main

(Astroblogging) I’m blogging this because Hub Spot told me I should. No, this is not some evil plot on Hub Spot’s part. A while back I wrote about Hub Spot’s Web Site Grader which is very cool way to see what is good and not helpful about your current site.

Web Site Grader spun out mini-version of this as Blog Grader. In looking at their helpful recommendations they told me I should do another post. They also had some other helpful things to say. They recommended I should post more often, recommending at least once a day, though in their own blog post they noted that A list bloggers post twice a day. They thought the average post length was a little short. And they’ll show you the level of social media engagement that your blog enjoys, or not.

In the end, if you want, you can get this nifty little badge (shown above) that can be inserted into your blog, if you want to display your blog rank.

All in all, this is nice snapshot of your blog, and following their suggestions will help you out a bit, without stressing out with a lot of do’s and don’ts.

If you want you can type in another blogs URL to see how you stack up to them.

While you are at it, you can check their list of the Top Sixty Astrology Blogs for October 2010 based on their rankings.

Looks like I have some work to do, so I better get cracking! Let me know how this works for you!

About Beth Turnage

Astrologer since 1986 and blogger since 2007, I write a lot. Some people like to read it.
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10 Responses to Grade Your Blog Here

  1. I cannot make heads or tails out of this grader. I was ranked #44 on bestastrologyblogs in September and now I’m #1, and I don’t think I did anything different. The only real useful recommendation I received from HubSpot was to add alt tags to all my images.

    The real funny thing was that my blog’s articles are written at like middle school level and Lynn’s Astrodynamics is written at college level. 😉

    • Beth Turnage says:

      Jeffrey,

      It is entirely possible that when they polled the different sources for September, someone like Google wasn’t sharing information on that day which would distort the ranking. It’s happened to me. Also today, when I first polled Astroblogging, it came up with a ranking of 14 and then a few minutes later (after some information came in I gather) the ranking went up to 54. Of course for an A-list astrology blogger like yourself, I am sure there isn’t much you don’t know already. 😉

      As far as the reading level goes, Hubspot ranks sites higher with a more common reading reading level than ones with college level writing. They view a more common reading level as being able to reach a broader number of readers. Notice that I rarely write above the 10th grade level. That is entirely on purpose, even though I have a college level vocabulary and use it at times when I speak.

      I think this grader works pretty well for people who are new or have been blogging for a while and need some easy tips on improving the visibility of their websites.

  2. Elsa says:

    I went from #1 to #16 to #2 on bestastrologyblogs over the last 3 months. They used a different source and have also dropped astrodispatch – I think.

    I got a 98 on the blog grader. I am surely happy about it but have no idea what it actually means.

    • Beth Turnage says:

      Elsa,

      Yes, those blog ranks are surely flexible aren’t they! I think the key is to keep an eye on the rank that comes up most often and throw out the ones most different.

      I’ll see if I can’t find out how those blog grader ranks are put together and blog on it.

      Beth

  3. Jamie says:

    Hiya guys. Some explaination about the ups and down on the Best Astrology Blogs. I started using Website Grader, but a lot of our friends with great blogs weren’t being listed because Website Grader focuses on SEO, and heavily marks down blogs on Blogger and WordPress. It favoured big sites like astrology.com even though the blogs there have no comments.

    A couple of months ago I changed to Blog Grader which doesn’t seem to mind people on Blogger or WordPress. That first update with this new system had Sasstrology and ElsaElsa down low, I don’t know why, maybe because it was a new system. This October update seems to be a much fairer reflection.

    Still not perfect, as you mentioned Beth, blogging daily vastly improves the score, regarldess of content. As for Astrodynamics, I think there is a problem because one site is self hosted, and Musings is linked to beliefnet. So on Best Astrology Sites, Lynn isn’t anywhere, the alexa ranking applies to beliefnet, and astrodynamics.net is not ranked well enough.

    Elsa, I haven’t included Astrodispatch in this new system, because both these sites are aggregators. Still working out how this Blog Grader works myself. Most important seems to be frequency of posts, then comments. Interaction on Facebook also looks to be important.

  4. Michelle says:

    I take all of these site rankers with a grain of salt. Some of them only include the sites that actually sign up for the service- so if someone doesn’t sign up they don’t get included.

    For about 8 months blog grader had me at about a 44. It said I wasn’t posting anything. I use them as a rough guide for how well I’m doing.

  5. These rankings are all just tools for the ego. Write/blog because you love to write – not for stupid rankings. Elsa & Eric & Lynn should consistently be on top. I made it to no 60 & haven’t even touched that blog for months which just shows how inaccurate & silly it is when others who post all the time didn’t even make it

    • Beth Turnage says:

      Kathryn,

      You are entitled to your opinion and your feelings, but I tend not to think as these rankings as some sort of report card or as a competition with my colleagues. Instead, I use them as a measure of my own progress as a blogger. Blogging is not just writing. We all have journals for that. Blogging is the craft of merging writing with social media skills. It is a unique and distinctly Aquarian method of connecting with other people.

      Tools such as Blog Grader help us with our blogging by pointing out things we can do to better reach and engage our audience.

  6. Posting all the time does not guarantee good quality and I don’t see why you should be rewarded by high rankings because of it. The Blogs I enjoy might post very rarely, but when they do they are real gems.
    Well put Beth about it being an Aquarian method of connecting with other people.

    • Beth Turnage says:

      Marina,

      You are absolutely right that sites such as blog grader do not measure the quality of the posts. What they measure, of course is the SEO value of the blog, how readily the Search Engines find your material. While posting everyday is a huge challenge (and one that I have not met recently) is a sure way to build up your authority with the Search engines. But why should we care about the Search Engines? If you blog for expression and not necessarily to build audience, you don’t. If you blog because you absolutely adore the blending of blogging and writing skills, then gaining SEO authority is part of the challenge. Some of us do it for monetary reasons, hoping to raise our profile professionally and/or some profitability into our sites. Some of us do it for the combination of all three.

      One would hope that in blogging astrologers present the very best they have to offer whether they post once a month or once a day because ultimately we are all responsible for how the public perceives our profession. When someone who is unfamiliar with the totality of astrology comes across one of our posts, they will make a judgement about us from it. I would prefer that judgement to be “I may not understand everything that blogger says, but gee, it seems informative and helpful and I want to see more.” We are our own editors of the quality of our posts and a whole lot of us are doing a good job at it.

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