Wow, what a great use of two hours of my day. Even as a self proclaimed blog advocate and SEO/SEM expert, I must say that I learned quite a bit. Here were some of the key points that I found most valuable:

• Balance your blogging life: spend 1/3 of your time posting on your blog, 1/3 reading other blogs, and 1/3 commenting!
• Never use a subdomain of a blogging platform as your URL, buy a domain and install it. (I told you so!)
• Funny and Enticing Titles work best.
• Posting weekly is “the norm.”

Some of this I already knew, but sometimes it helps my clients to hear it from other people.

I must admit that these guys seem to have a really good grasp of the benefits of business blogging as well as how it will help with your company’s website SEO. If you are interested, HubSpot is doing another webinar on Social Media Marketing, April 9, 2-3PM EST

What to expect? Website Grader measures quite a few SEO characteristics, each of which is pretty important. In addition measuring the relevance of the content, the readability of the content as well as meta information, it also evaluates things like Google page rank, Alexa traffic rank, Diggs and other inbound links. Measuring, tracking and improving each of these elements will help your website (or blog) become more popular in the search engines.

Why on earth would I tell my customers about this? First of all understand that the first thing I do when evaluating a prospect customers as a good SEO client, is run their URL through Website Grader. I often print and show them the results. I have found that the information is more valuable to them, when they can see that it is coming from a non-bias, third party. Most of the time, my customers have no idea how to improve in any or all of these areas, so it helps me explain what the SEO picture looks like, without sounding too much like a “sales-guy.” Las thing is, if you find HubSpot through my site, and you decide to hire them, not me for SEO, please make sure you mention my name to them.

More about the HubSpot webinar here.