Tycoons Row

I came a cross a cool tool which allows you to give a value to your website and give you some insights on how to increase not only the awareness of your website/blog but also make it more attractive.  From a marketer’s view, this is an excellent tool because it allows you to set yourself an expectation of where your site is now & benchmark it compared to the field.
WebsiteGrader comes to us from Dharmesh Shah, a software entrepreneur who is currently running his 3rd company, HubSpot.  He also runs a blog, OnStartups, which gives some great insights regarding as the name implies: Start-ups.

I wasn’t disappointed by being graded 66/100 (you can’t achieve 100 by the way) for TycoonsRow.  This gives me an accurate reflection & motivation into what I need to accomplish to get to 99.  Now, I can create & set milestones of achievement going from 66 to 77, then to 88 & on to 99.

The site gives you an intrinsic perspective of your website & benchmarks against others sites similar and like your own.

The sitegrader uses an algorithim based on a variety of variables, some of which are:

• Google Page Rank:  Links from one page to another can be seen as a vote. The more links from one site to another greatly increases the value of another persons site.
• Web Page Structure:  Website Grader examines your metadata & also provides
• Domain Info:  Just like Register.com provides this data, this one also gives how old the domain is in days.  Currently, mine is 196 days - although I’ve only been up & running for 60.  This gives you insight from the thought of an idea to conception.
• Web Page Content:  Not only does it count the links to other pages but also the words.  I think it only counts the words on the homepage though however.  I currently have 30,088.  What’s a book nowadays? 100,000 words?
• Conversion Methods:  Use of RSS Feeds, or the use of Forms on the site.  I have RSS Feeds for the site specifically for the posts & comments, and additionally, I use Feedburner.  For the forms, I have a flash based form as well, for people and business to send in their profiles about themselves or businesses respectively.

• Inbound Links:  A very important factor is the number of inbound links.  This is essential, especially for commenters, pingbacks.  This is what really gives credence to the value of your site.  I currently have 42 inbound links from Yahoo & 732 inbound from MSN.  The only problem is interpreting what & where these links are.  I would love to have 732 commentors per post.
• Technorati Ranking:  I call this one your tech popularity.  If “any” site can get some type of rank popularity with the tech crowd who started it all, then you have officially become a player.  My ranking currently is 499,948. I’ve got some work to do & this is the beginning.
• Del.icio.us Bookmarks: I think this is a drawback to this tool.  Given the fact that there are multiple book marking services, one way this can be improved is have “Bookmarks” as a variable & not just “Del.icio.us” bookmarks.  This would more effective.  It would be like saying:  X site has x % share of Delicious bookmarks & y% share of Reddit bookmarks.
• Traffic Ranking through Alexa: WebsiteGrader uses

What’s excellent about this tool is that it provides not only quantitave values but also qualitative content of what the numbers mean.  For example, it not only provides an Alexa traffic ranking but states what the traffic means.  For TycoonsRow.com, the Alexa ranking is 1,291,976 as of February 26, 2007, which means that according to Alexa, my site is 1,291,976 most trafficed site on the web.  Now, from a marketing perspective I have some work to do & will definitely plan on getting down in the 100’s of thousands as a priority milestone.

This tool can definitely be improved by simply adding in factors from ranking site Compete.  Also, a drawback to this site is how it compares to other sites.  The categories are not endless, however, maybe too generic.  How would you categorize a site like TechCrunch or Read/WriteWeb?  Would you categorize them as New-Media, Business Blogs, Personal site/Blog, entertainment/publishing?  We as bloggers already categorize ourselves as bloggers, however their is a chasm being formed between the personal, for fun or for profit.  There needs to be an understanding do we categorize blogging overall as “New Media”, or is it just something that we do.  I categorize myself as a Blogger running a “New Media” publication.