Blog Inspection for Pro Blog Design: 79.5 out of 100

September 25th, 2008 by Easton Ellsworth

Here is a 130-point Blog Inspection of ProBlogDesign.com.

Some time ago I told my friend Michael Martin at Pro Blog Design that I’d gladly publish a review of his blog plus ideas on how to improve it.

I hope you like this, Michael! (And to anyone else, let me know if you want one of these for your blog!)

See a printer-friendly version (PDF, 52 KB).

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Introduction

Michael, I’ve gone through your blog in depth and rated 130 aspects of it on a scale from 1 to 5:

• 1 = Desperately needs improvement
• 3 = Okay, could be better but no cause for concern
• 5 = Perfect or near-perfect

ProBlogDesign.com Overall Score: 79.5 out of 100

• Blog content: 79.3
• Blog design: 89.8
• Blog community: 50.0
• Blog traffic: 65.0
• Blog feed/email subscriber count: 80.0

• Blog search engine optimization (SEO): 83.3

• Blog social media optimization (SMO): 41.8

• Blog monetization: 93.3

• Blog value / return on investment (ROI): 82.5

79.5 is excellent, but there are certainly things you can do to improve Pro Blog Design quickly and get better results with it.

Attention Items

The following items received a score of 1 out of 5 and deserve immediate attention (but not necessarily immediate action; see below for planning suggestions).

• Visible policies
• Useful policies
• Visible social media sharing options
• Relevant social media sharing options
• Appealing social media sharing options
• Visible author information
• Compelling author information
• BlogCatalog.com presence
• Mixx.com presence
• LinkedIn.com presence
• Propeller.com presence
• Yahoo! Buzz presence
• YouTube presence

Blog Improvement Recommendations

• Overall: Keep asking your readers what they want – especially, what problems and burning questions they have. And just keep doing what you’re doing – maybe publishing more often to satisfy your expanding readership.
• Blog content: Publish more audio/video content. Show off your work process a bit more. Maybe offer readers a free case study showing what you did for a client and how it impacted their business.
• Blog design: Consider making it more clear when each post was published. Also maybe offer a full archives page.
• Blog community: Put your face and/or voice somewhere where people can easily find out what you look/sound like.

• Blog search engine optimization (SEO): Not strictly an SEO tip, but you may want a bit more privacy on your WHOIS records.

• Blog social media optimization (SMO): Register at Technorati and claim your blog. Same at BlogCatalog.

• Blog monetization: You might want to tweak your services page to make it a bit easier for people to contact you. Offer as many ways to contact you as possible – email, phone, Skype, Twitter, IM, snail mail, message in a bottle, etc. Consider offering multiple service packages for different types of clients. Consider also offering ongoing design touch-up services on a revolving basis to some folks.

Section-by-Section Blog Inspection

(Hey, that rhymed!)

Blog Content: 79.3 out of 100

1. 3 Number of published articles (posts + pages)
2. 3 Age of first published article
3. 4 Age of latest published article
4. 3 Posts published per month
5. 3 Comments by blog visitors per month
6. 3 Trackbacks/pingbacks per month
7. 5 Words per article
8. 5 Images/audio/videos per article
9. 2 Internal links per article
10. 4 External links per article
11. 5 Compelling headlines
12. 5 Descriptive headlines
13. 5 Concise headlines
14. 5 Appropriate writing style
15. 4 Useful content
16. 4 Remarkable content
17. 5 Targeted content
18. 5 Accurate content
19. 4 Unique content
20. 3 Viral content
21. 3 Effective use of multiple media formats
22. 5 Appropriate anchor text in hyperlinks
23. 5 Appropriate number of hyperlinks
24. 5 Relevant hyperlinks
25. 5 Descriptive use of categories/tags
26. 5 Concise use of categories/tags
27. 5 Relevant use of categories/tags
28. 1 Visible policies
29. 1 Useful policies

Blog Design: 4.5 out of 5

1. 5 Eye-pleasing
2. 4 Unique
3. 4 Simple
4. 4 Organized
5. 5 Appropriate
6. 4 Easy to read
7. 4 Easy to navigate
8. 5 Easy to distinguish links from text
9. 5 Looks same in various browsers
10. 5 Looks same at different resolutions
11. 5 Mobile version looks good
12. 5 No broken links
13. 5 No code errors
14. 5 No missing alt text/placeholders
15. 5 Memorable favicon
16. 5 Appropriately-sized masthead
17. 5 Eye-pleasing masthead
18. 5 Relevant masthead
19. 5 Appropriately-sized logo
20. 5 Resizable logo
21. 5 Eye-pleasing logo
22. 5 Relevant logo
23. 5 Logo works without color
24. 5 Blog works without images
25. 5 Blog works without CSS
26. 5 Appropriately-sized blog title
27. 5 Memorable blog title
28. 5 Descriptive blog title
29. 4 Memorable tagline
30. 5 Descriptive tagline
31. 2 Visible search box
32. 5 Obvious search box
33. 4 Useful search box
34. 5 Visible feed/email subscription options
35. 5 Visible article headlines
36. 5 Appropriate number/size of article excerpts on homepage
37. 5 Appropriate number/size of article excerpts on archive pages
38. 1 Visible social media sharing options
39. 1 Relevant social media sharing options
40. 1 Appealing social media sharing options
41. 5 Visible blog comment area
42. 5 Easy to publish a comment
43. 5 Easy to browse comments/trackbacks/pingbacks
44. 4 Organized sidebar(s)
45. 5 Useful sidebar elements
46. 5 Organized footer
47. 5 Useful footer elements
48. 5 Feed displays correctly
49. 3 Useful feed elements

Blog Community: 2.5 out of 5

1. 1 Visible author information
2. 1 Compelling author information
3. 3 Visible contact information
4. 3 Compelling contact information
5. 3 Blog comments encouraged
6. 4 Useful blog comments

Blog Traffic: 3.25 out of 5

1. 3 Monthly visitors
2. 3 Monthly unique visits
3. 3 Monthly page views
4. 4 Average visit duration

Blog Feed/Email Subscriber Count: 4 out of 5

1. 4 Feed subscribers
2. n/a Email subscribers
3. n/a Newsletter subscribers
4. n/a Autoresponder subscribers

Blog Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 4.2 out of 5

1. 4 Number of backlinks
2. 4 Quality of backlinks
3. 4 Search engine rankings/SERPs
4. 4 Google PageRank
5. 3 Domain age
6. 3 Pages indexed in search engines
7. 3 Page load time
8. 5 Homepage URL memorability
9. 5 Homepage URL relevance
10. 5 URL structure
11. 5 Descriptive blog title/tagline
12. 5 Descriptive article headlines/subheadings

Blog Social Media Optimization (SMO) 2.1 out of 5

1. n/a Social media referral traffic as percentage of all referral traffic
2. 1 BlogCatalog.com presence
3. 4 Delicious.com presence
4. 3 Digg.com presence
5. 1 Mixx.com presence
6. 1 LinkedIn.com presence
7. 1 Propeller.com presence
8. 3 StumbleUpon.com presence
9. 4 Technorati.com presence
10. 3 Twitter.com presence
11. 1 Yahoo! Buzz presence
12. 1 YouTube presence

Blog Monetization 4.7 out of 5

1. 5 Appropriate amount of advertising/sales copy
2. 5 Appropriate placement of advertising/sales copy
3. 5 Relevant advertising/sales copy
4. 5 Compelling advertising/sales copy
5. 4 Appropriately-priced products/services
6. 4 Valuable products/services

Blog Value / Return On Investment (ROI) 4.1 out of 5

1. 5 Discernible purpose
2. 5 Discernible target audience
3. 4 Addictive
4. 4 Remarkable
5. 4 Irresistible
6. 3 Irreplaceable
7. 4 Valuable
8. 4 Makes a difference

What to Do Next

Michael, here are some ideas on how to use the data and advice above to speed up your blog improvement process (adapted from my Blog Improvement Checklist).

Plan

For each checklist item, rate on a scale from 1 to 5:

1. How important it is to improve (1 = not important; 5 = extremely important)
2. How urgent it is to improve (1 = not urgent; 5 = extremely urgent)
3. How easy it is to improve (1 = not easy; 5 = extremely easy)
4. How quick it is to improve (1 = extremely time-consuming; 5 = extremely quick)
5. How inexpensive it is to improve (1 = extremely expensive; 5 = extremely inexpensive)

Add the scores together and divide by 5 to get a priority score for each item.

e.g. eye-pleasing logo = 1 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 5 = 15/5 = 3.00

Sort the items in descending order of priority.

You may wish to ignore items below a certain priority score (such as 2.00).

For each item, write a specific goal to improve your checklist score over the next month.

e.g. I will publish at least one blog post per weekday in the month of October.

You may also wish to set section-specific goals (e.g. a general blog content improvement goal) or overall blog goals.

Act

This part’s easy. Just force yourself to carry out your plan.

Review

Daily: Keep track of how much time, energy and/or money you spend trying to improve each aspect of your blog. Evaluate yourself as an improver. Ask, “What could I do to speed up my blog improvement efforts and make them more effective?

Monthly: Repeat steps 1-3 to track the improvement of your blog and review/set blog improvement goals. Some things may improve or worsen without your intervention (for example, the number and quality of blog comments may fluctuate without any effort on your part).

I would love to follow up in 1-3 months to give you a new Blog Inspection so you can see where your scores stand.

Best wishes going forward at Pro Blog Design, Michael! – Easton

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Note: This is without looking at any raw internal data, just external sources. Would be better feedback if I had more data from Michael, especially as to what his goals and vision for his blog were. Also, this is not meant to be isolated – so it’s supposed to instead become part of a conversation between me and Michael to help him improve. Also, the numbers help us internalize where we are at, but just because one blog gets a 65 out of 100 on my inspection and another gets a 90 doesn’t mean one is better than the other. This is a snapshot and does have some comparative value, but to really compare the value of two blogs one must go into more detail on their growth trends over time, their maturity, the competitiveness of their respective niches, etc. Which I wil discuss soon on this blog, so please subscribe.

This is the centerpiece of Iris, my blog consulting service.

What would you add to my thoughts? What do you think Michael is doing right with his blog and how could he improve?

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