Buzz

Buzz: Website Grader – Another way to grade your website and evaluate your SEO

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Website Grader blends over 50 different variables, including search engine data, website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others, to evaluate the quality of a website, provide comparable data for other sites, and tips on how to improve yours.

websitegrader

I was intrigued so I decided to run a number of websites through the grading and came up with some interesting stuff.

johnchow grades

This report for JohnChow Dot Com graded his site at 99.6%. While this doesn’t really surprise me, for sites that score lower grades, a comparison can be quite instructive. So I ran my own blog through this site.

investorblogger grades

So the grade is a little lower, probably because of the fewer Diggs, fewer Bloglines accounts, and the fewer De.licio.us bookmarks. They do provide a download ebook so that you can pick up a few tips, I’m just reading it now. It’s always fun to rate your site and see how it measures, but really the whole blog thing is simply about how much traffic you get anyway. So don’t let this be another Blogging Dead End.

Get Started with Reading Personal Finance Blogs

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For Alan

A friend recently asked me where to start with this personal finance reading, and so it got me thinking: how would I start if I had to start again. In fact, I’d simply choose five better known feeds, and read them for a while. A lot also would depend on the angle… Am I in debt? Am I seeking to invest? Am I trying to make money in business? …

Given his standings, I thought I would choose five good feeds that I read for someone who is a busy, successful teacher with not much time on his hands:

But you can visit PFBlogs.org to check out the most recent updated blogs and find one of the many good ones listed. (And, no my own blog isn’t listed. Why? I don’t have a clue!)

Do you have a favorite? What would you recommend Alan read? Why?

Ovation Credit Services: Does it deserve a standing ovation?

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After yesterday’s post on the credit card habits of bloggers, and the results of the survey, a staggering 23% of the bloggers did not know their FICO score. While I’m sure that this was at least partly because some of us lived outside the US, I wondered why the others did not check.

In this paid post I look at checking your credit rating through one particular website, and answer one simple question: how easy or difficult is it to do this the first time? Welcome to Ovation Credit Services, a website that specialises in finding and repairing credit reports so that clients get a better deal when they want to purchase that LCD TV or new 4×4!

ovation credit services

Finding information

To start this process, let’s see how you would go about finding out about information about credit scoring: Ovation provides extensive learning pages through the menu on the top right including, downloadable books, videos, a glossary, and general information pages. While there’s no mention of the individual credit reporting services, there is a general description of how the websites calculate your actual credit score and the weightings used, the various laws, and general customer queries.

The Website: Speedy, Responsive and Lots of Trust Building

Clicking through the website extensively to provide this review, I noted that the website is responsive, and fast. In fact, the homepage is quite large, but when saved to my disk only showed 257Kb. That size means that the website should load quickly even on slower or dialup connections. Each page loaded smoothly, and I didn’t find any out of date links at all. Moreover, I was surprised at how smooth the website seemed in Firefox. It’s important that websites adequately cover the major browsers, and it’s amazing how many sites don’t even bother with making their site compatible with the #2 browser.

In addition, it was easy to access the Privacy Policy, Disclaimers, Terms and so on, each of these was clearly linked in the footer of the page (which is where I found one non-active link under “Credit News”). The website has gone to a lot of trouble to enhance its reputation and trust with a number of features: including a no-risk refund policy, special deals, BBB credits and links to its record on BBB which is where you find out that the business started in 1976.

Loose Ends: Crowded HomePage and out of date blog

There are also a number of ways to contact the company, including a snail mail address, a telephone number and online chat, all of which add to the impression that this is a solid company with a reputation. However, there are some loose ends, including a blog that seems to be linked to some pages of the website: at Credit Repair Blog. It looks like the blog hasn’t been updated in about a year. Having worked with a blog on a credit card website before, they can be very useful to draw additional traffic and rankings to your main site, and such results can be very effective if the blog is written well. I’d strongly suggest reviving the blog and integrating that to the main site.

I also feel that the frontpage is really trying to do TOO much as there are 15 clickable boxes below the graphic above. I like the way the boxes light up when users mouse over them, but that there is too much there and this suggests perhaps a lack of focus at the moment on exactly WHO is going to use the website. I’d suggest trimming this area to just seven: the five boxes in the first row, the last page wide box, and all the others can be moved to a slideshow area where users click arrows to see the next offer situated where “No Risk Refund” is currently.

And so,…

In conclusion, though this service is not cheap and may not be suitable for all those who need good credit reporting, the website goes to some lengths to create both an impression of trustworthiness and value for money. I’d like to take a look around inside the site and the report areas to see what they have to offer. I’ll be contacting them to find out more. So stay tuned.

Sponsored by Ovation Credit Services.