Edubook.com Blog Review
Today I’m presenting to you edubook.com which is administered by Peter Chang.
In the words of Peter, edubook.com, is a collaborative article marketing blog which allows people to publish their hand written articles in order to promote their authorship online. The site allows any free-lance writers to publish articles on subjects ranging all the way from Education, to Arts, to Business, Home Improvement, Sports, and many others. The site encourages you to join them, to see the benefits of article marketing.
Blog Theme
The Blog theme of edubook is very impressive in my mind. The orange, black, and white color scheme, flows together very nicely. The site looks very professional, with the articles nicely placed in the center of the blog, and large titles explaining their topic. The site doesn’t look very cluttered at all, and has nicely placed RSS and email subscribe options, in the top right corner. I am very impressed with the site, especially considering how most sites and blogs look very cluttered, as people try to cram lots of excessive widgets onto the pages. The site almost looks too bare, but as far as websites go that is not necessarily a bad thing.
Final Grade
8/10
Jonathan’s Suggestions
Though the site looks very professional, I’d love to see some type of graphic in the header. Though just the words “EduBook” is a good header, you have lots of free space to the right of it. I’d love to see a picture of something related to the site, to make the site a little less bare.
Navigation Through Site
The site has a very large archives system set up on the left sidebar. Though some people could find this annoying, considering the purpose of this site is to advertise articles, I think this is a great way to keep the old posts relevant, and thus is justified. However, I do not think a blog would be able to get away with something that large. The different topics have nice, click-able scroll downs lists, which are great because you don’t need to go to any new page to see the various sub-categories. The site also features a useful little search box in the top left corner, that allows you to find specific articles. The site loads very fast, because there is no excessive flash options on it. All of the sub-pages load very quickly as well, which makes it nice to browse through.
Final Grade
7/10
Jonathan’s Suggestions:
N/A
Extra Pages
The site has three pages on it’s header, Home, Join Us, and Contact. Again it seems almost too bare, it includes only the basics. The contact page is simple and professional, it does it’s job. The Join Us page is very inviting, and encourages you to join their team. Nothing much to say here, just the very minimum, essential pages.
Final Grade
6/10
Jonathan’s Suggestions:
A Top or Recommended posts page needs to be added. If this site is focused on articles, and they’re trying to get new writers to join their group, showing some example work would be a great addition. We need some sample articles, to get us to want to read more, right now it’s just the most recent posts, which more often then not are related to what I like.
Quality of Content
According to websitegrader the site has a reading level of highschool, which is a good level, because elementry isn’t good, but you don’t want college level. Blog posts are supposed to be easy to read, and “highschool level” is a good middle ground, for a site devoted to articles. The posts average about 500 words each, which though that is a bit small, if they can adequately cover the topic then that is fine. The articles are good at not beating around the bush, and cover the topics nicely. You can tell they use grammar, and spelling check, and so these make the articles flow very well. The articles were not fascinating to me, because they aren’t related to my niche, but they are informative and easy to read.
Final Grade
6/10
Jonathan’s Suggestions:
I would like to see some list articles, instead of always just block print. Bloggers love lists, and they are much easier to read, then just paragraphs all the time. I’d love to see you switch it up every now and then.
The Use of Ads
This is the disaster of the site. This is a rare, seemingly obvious mistake by Edu Book. The homepage isn’t that awful, there’s only one adsense ad on the right sidebar. But this ad is incredibly distracting because it is Green and White! It completely contrasts the colors of the site, and needs to be removed immediately. If you click on a post it only gets worse. Now the posts are surrounded by ads, and the left and bottom bars are replaced by totally irrelevant ads. Relevant ads are bad enough, but these have to do with losing weight, and vacation deals.
Final Grade
2/10
Jonathan’s Suggestions:
Fortunately ads are something that can be easily fixed. It’s better to have a problem with this, then with content or theme issues. My suggestions would be to first change the ad on the home page to text only. Right now it’s image and text, and I tried those ads before. The only image ads are “SEO Malpractice Apogee,” which nobody will click on, and the colors are very disturbing, with almost all blog themes. If you Have to keep the ads for some reason, then I would suggest limiting it to one ad. Find which ad is giving you the best results and keep that one, and discard the rest. You aren’t getting enough traffic to make it worth it, and right now you just look desperate, and unprofessional.
Use of Widgets
What widgets, you’re probably asking? Edubook has a nice subscribe button, though it could be bigger, with the standard option for email as well. The Technorati authority link, and the add to blog favorites link, seem unnecessary and a waste of space. The impressive technorati ranking makes you expect more then what it gives, leaving you slightly disappointed with the result. The ads we already discussed… The links to Author Pages are good. Again they are a bit large, but for a guest blog, that is needed to keep all parties happy. The site is very bare of good widgets.
Final Grade
5/10
Jonathan’s Suggestions
I would recommend ditching the technorati links, and the ad. Some of the author’s have little descriptions under them, but not all of them, so get rid of these because it makes it unneat. Right now the site is seriously struggling from a dearth of comments. The site looks very weak with almost every post saying zero comments. I would recommend, adding a top commentator list, to encourage blog commenting. I would also recommend ditching the copyscape warning, if people are going to copy your work, a warning isn’t going to stop them. I would suggest adding a links to the PR of the site. A PR of 4 is very impressive, and helps give credibility to the site’s articles. I would also recommend taking off the amount of subscribers, until it’s a more flattering number. I would also recommend adding a Recommended posts, where you can showcase the top articles of the site.
Site Stats
Right now edubook has a respectable Alexa ranking of 233K and a Technorati of 51K. These are especially good numbers when you consider the site has only been around for shortly over a month. The site has a PR of 4 already, and it looks like these numbers will continue to grow. It has 92 subscribers, which is a great number for a month. If the site has this impressive stats already, I wouldn’t be surprised to see these numbers continue to grow over time.
Final Grade
8/10
Jonathan’s Suggestions:
Honestly I think these stats are pretty flattering. I wasn’t incredibly impressed with the content, and so to have these good stats after such a short time is phenomenal. The stats I think are largely due to the wide range of topics covered, and the incredible rate of which new posts are added.
Drum-roll Questions
Is this site worth visiting right now, Yes or No?
Sadly, right now I have to say No. The key reason for that, is because right now, edubook has no section of articles having do do with blogging. Considering mastersofseo.com is a blogging tips site, I’m not going to recommend a site that has nothing to do with blogging tips. However, with that said, if you want information on practically anything else, there’s a good chance it’ll have an article on it. But right now, it’s not related enough to the niche I post in, to make it worth the read.
Final Constructive Criticisms
I asked several bloggers, to give me their first impressions of edubook.com These are the opinions of Max Miroff from Blogbadly.com, and the team over at BloggingwithSuccess.net Here are their opinions.
Alright, here’s what I think:
The design is very clean and professional – orange, black, and white are solid colors that go well together. The posts seem scattered about a variety of topics which isn’t such a good thing if you want to build a consistent readership interested in one topic, but there are 127 subscribers so perhaps that’s working for them. I don’t like the fact that some of the top rated authors have small bios next to their names while others don’t – it looks out of place. Either require a short entry or don’t add anything. The “Viewed By” on each post should be removed – it’s useless and the numbers are fairly unflattering to the sites traffic (viewed by twenty readers, for example).
-Max Miroff, Blog Badly – Blogging Tips and Tricks.
Here are my first impressions:
The blog has got too much categories which may be a good or bad thing. Because of so much randomness, people will have to think twice before subscribing. Participation of readers seems to be low as last 3-4 articles have no comments. However, blog has good chances of success and you can get traffic if your article is nice enough. You get your profile page at the blog, so it will be useful in publicizing your blog. Also, clean homepage means user can focus on your content and follow to your blog.
-A Team blog dedicated to helping new blogs succeed – Blogging With Success
I want to make a point of reiterating one point that Max said, the number showing the amount of post views, is incredibly unflattering. Make that your first change. Also a lot of the inner posts, don’t have meta keywords, and meta descriptions. I would recommend adding the SEO All in One wordpress plugin. My final thoughts would be, this site is quickly growing, and with it’s good SEO, I can see it getting a lot of success. Right now it’s not worth a subscribe to me, but in a few weeks/months, this site could very easily become a site to be reckoned with.
This is was a paid review by Don Gilbert of mastersofseo. If you are interested in a paid review, check out my advertise page for more information. As you can see I cover all the aspects of your site. This is a great chance for you to get constructive criticism about your site.
Please comment below, if you have constructive criticisms to add. I’m sure Peter would like to hear your opinion as well.
Article marketing is one of the commonly used strategies of webmasters. Many actually rely on this tactic for their link building. Edubook.com can be a great help in improving their online stuffs.
.-= Jessie @ magnetic underlay´s last blog ..Biomagnetic magnetic underlay review =-.
There are so many ways to build a link. One of which is through article marketing. I’m glad to discover this edubook.com. It’s something that can really help people having their activities online.
.-= Justin @ crm for small business´s last blog ..Differences between CRM implementation and CRM adoption (Part 2) =-.
Article marketing is a great SEO tools and marketing tool, one that can yield instant results, yet give long term benefits for your website and blog.
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Deep linking, this means that all the pages in blog will be fully optimized rather than just the home page. This will drastically increase the visibility of website.