Guest article by Eva Vesper of Web Hosting Search.
If you’re running a web site you need to know how it is doing, in particular how you’re performing against your competitors, and where you can improve.
These useful tools will help you to monitor and (hopefully) improve the performance of your site according to generally recognized web site marketing criteria.
SEOmoz Trifecta Page Strength Tool
If you would like to measure the strength of a certain page on a site, blog, or an entire domain, then check out the SEOmoz Trifecta Page Strength Tool (free registration required).
Based on various factors you will see your impact within your industry and can compare it to others. Note that free accounts are limited to one report per day.
Popuri
If you think it’s a lot of hassle to use several different tools Popuri might be what you’re looking for. Popuri allows you to get a variety of information — from PageRank to del.icio.us bookmarks — all at once.
It also includes Compete rank which provides a useful counterpoint to Alexa in order to get a better picture of how your site ranks in popularity.
Raven SEO Analyzer
The free Raven SEO Analyzer aims to help you build a better, more optimized website to rank you higher on search engines.
It checks things like whether your site uses heading tags properly, has deprecated HTML, contains inline styles, and has an acceptable page weight.
It also scores you out of 100 which is helpful if you’re monitoring the performance of your site over time or comparing against competitors.
Mint
Mint is a web analytics tool somewhat similar to Google Analytics. It provides all the usual statistics on everything from number of visits to unique referrers.
Unlike Google Analytics and other web analytics packages, it also tracks RSS feeds, browser window size, and has a library of official and community-developed plugins.
Website Grader
If you’re looking to analyze the marketing effectiveness of your web site, try Website Grader.
It provides you with a score out of 100 based on criteria such as web site traffic, SEO, social popularity and various other technical factors. It also provides you with advice on how you can improve your ranking.
One useful feature is the ability to compare your site against multiple other websites. This could be really helpful in better understanding how your site stacks up against its competitors.
Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg is a tool that supplements your standard analytics package. It comes in 3 versions — standard (free), plus and pro — depending on how many visits and pages you want to track at once.
Crazy Egg lets you track what visitors are doing on particular page and shows you what links they clicked via heatmaps and various overlays. It’s a great way to test the effectiveness of different versions of a page to see which one is the most effective.
SiteYogi
SiteYogi sets out to be a one-stop-shop for web site analysis.
It examines a variety of areas, including how well optimized your site is for search engines as well as the number of backlinks you have, various social media rankings, whether your code is valid, and how well ranked your site is. It provides quite a comprehensive overview.
Smart PageRank
Smart PageRank provides you with a lot more data about your site than the name suggests.
Like some of the other tools mentioned, it provides you with a variety of data about your site and its ranking on various search engines. Unlike other tools, it estimates a dollar value for your site based on these factors.
SEOCentro
Looking for a variety of SEO-related tools all in one place? Then SEOCentro is worth a look.
It includes tools that will check meta tags, pagerank, links popularity, keyword position, and search engine saturation. It also provides a server headers checking tool, which is useful to make sure that any 301 redirects are set up correctly.