Tech Review

I found a great site for bloggers and webmasters called Hubspot. It assesses your site and tells you it's optimized for search engines. It has essays on social bookmarking and other hit-producing techniques. The obligatory SEO, "How to increase pagerank" article is present as are short essays on blogging, ways in which Blogspot and Wordpress fall short for business applications (no forms, etc), the proper use of keywords, and reversing something called the "Pareto Principle". The tips seem valuable and if I didn't have to work, I'd probably apply all of them.

Best of all is a tool called Web Grader, probably the most useful webmaster tool I've come across. It rates your site based on Google pagerank, Delicious-saved count, Google and Yahoo links, Alexa rank, and some other stuff. I learned that I needed to do a 301 redirect on my site (having "mysite.com" point to "www.mysite.com" If your site shows up as both www.mysite.com and mysite.com, then it's not redirected.) in order to have Google credit links to either address to the same domain. Oddly, when I did this, Web grader changed my "Google inbound links" from 1460 to 0 and my "Yahoo inbound links" from 164,000 to 0. Search hits actually increased, however, so I left it redirected.

According to Web Grader, I also have too many keywords (I cut out "Blogging beefcake"), and something called "Font Tags Found in HTML" which I'll ignore. Hubspot tells you how many people subscribe to your feed and assigns your whole site a readability index. My prose is at a sixth grade level which means that even Loretta Sanchez can read it.

For you "A-type" personalities, you can put in other websites and see how yours compares to theirs (Daily Kos, I'm coming after you!)

The service is free. You don't even have to own the domain to check a site. I can see some people getting addicted to this thing.

Webgrader gave Asymmetric a 93. That's an "A" in my book.