- My page title is way too long. It should be 70 characters or less and mine is 236
- My site description is also way too long. It should be no more than 150 characters, but I hit 160. I guess less is more for these first 2 points!
- 2 images are missing alt tags.
- My domain is going to expire in 4 months. I had no clue this could count against me, though the site is old! The farther the expire time is out in the future, the better search engines feel about the site.
- My Page Rank is 4. From what I gather, 4 is pretty good considering what has been going on on my site for the last 8 years (nothing!).
- I have a form! I guess having a form on the site counts towards looking alive to the search engines!
- I am looking to lock down some decent search engine rankings for 2 basic terms: freelance graphic design and logo design. It’s not clear if I have to pick one or the other and focus on it. For now, I’m not doing too badly (20-30 ranking) for having done nothing, essentially, in regards to “freelance graphic design” other than having had that in my title for eons. Notice I didn’t even rank for logo design, but I’m just starting that, like 5 days ago:
freelance graphic designer 1,401 30 freelance graphic design 1,775 30 - It looks like my site vocabulary is too high, being ranked as college undergraduate. It is suggested I lower it. It’s probably due to my predilection for run-on sentences. Why stop when you are having fun? Yes, I’ll work on that. If you want some long sentences, try reading German Biblical scholarly titles translated into English. There are some sentences that are close to a full page. Not good, not user-friendly.
- Overall, I got a score of 83.
- The last thing I learned is that there is an astonishing array of very powerful tools to help you analyze your site, and a wonderful cadre of friendly bloggers to help find the way.
First report: Hubspot’s Website Grader for BonFX
I have the good fortune of having owned “bonfx.com” for the last 10 years. It could be any domain name, but having had it for so long with the same subject matter is a benefit for SEO. It has always been a freelance graphic design website focused on my portfolio of web, print, and logo design work. It has never had a blog on it until last week.
As of right now, I only have about 15 articles, all authored in the last week. I got a hat tip from Jacob Cass over at Just Creative Design to check out the Hubspot Website Grader. I ran a report and I think – someone correct me if I’m wrong – I have reason to be pleased with where I’m at after one week of changing to a blog format. Of course I have a lot of work to do now, but it could be worse. See the report:
http://www.grader.com/site.php?URL=bonfx.com
I have a score of 83, and a Page Rank of 4. All of my old content is still being indexed, like totally random stuff and like Flash demos installed in their own folder from my days as a hack Flash Developer, temporary junk like a folder of pictures from when I sold my Jeep (96 Jeep Cherokee 4×4 – what a vehicle!), old customer sub-domains, and temp folders for friends like “stuff” hanging off the root.
So what did I learn? First, I learned that the way to increase SEO and ranking is to be humble, true, and honest and write good content. There is so much bad information out there that tries to game the system, but it won’t work. I just read last night, I think it was Jacob Cass (not sure now) that there are hundreds of PhDs working at Google and the like. You are not smarter than them, and they know how to write algorithms that smoke out the impostors. Essentially, do what is good and right, and do it in a good and right way, and you will do well in ranking. Essentially, it seems to be a fact now (and certainly more so as search engines get even better) that search engines will bless hard honest work and not much else.
Part of my blogging will chronicle my work in regards to ranking. Click the link above to Website Grader for a detailed report (and then get your own) of the BonFX website, or read some interesting facts I need to act on immediately:
UPDATE: I did a few of the items on the list above and moved my score from 83 to 90:
– Shortened title and description
– Increased length of ownership on my domain to 9 years out
– Shortened some sentences and added a few shorter posts
– Added portfolio with properly named and tagged images relating to my area of interest (logo design and graphic design)
This took a few hours, but it was worth it as I continue to follow the rules and do what those who know more than me about SEO have said to do.
Now I just need about 90,000 inbound links. Back in a few!
UPDATE 2: I did a few more things, like join a LinkedIn Group, update my profile there, fix some tags, get a few more articles in Twitter and Digg, and started using Flickr to host my images. Most of what I did won’t affect things for a few weeks, so with more content I hope to see a bigger bump and a PR go to 5 up from the 4 I currently have.
My score is now a 92, up from 90 a few days ago.
Up to 93 – I keep tweaking, reading, learning, working, writing, but mostly writing.
I figure if I’m going to spend so much time writing, I’m going to write on the best paper possible with the best ink possible, which would be maybe a 98 score or higher 🙂
Up to 96.4 and counting. Did more optimizing, robots.txt updates, writing and headline tweaking in Theme Hybrid. All the relevant SEO settings are in there! Check it out…
Up to 97 as of today. I’ve mainly gotten into a groove with content and SEO and haven’t changed much on the site:
http://websitegrader.com/site/bonfx.com
Maybe that last 2.9 percent is for inbound links, which is the critical thing I’m missing. Over the next few months, I’m going to focus on “logo design” with subsets like resources and process examples, “logo designer”, “freelance graphic designer”, and continue interesting posts regarding typefaces, fonts, and typography.
As of today, my grader score is 98.3. It seems from an SEO perspective, based on the Grade analysis of just the code and content, this graphic design blog is going pretty good. It’s also clear now that after 4 months of blogging from scratch here at bonfx.com, that getting inbound links is the hardest thing to do. More good content and promotion then! We are getting close to 50,000 unique visitors too. Probably another few weeks.