In Part 3 of our SEO Series, we’ll discuss some tools and techniques to assist you in analyzing your site. In Part 1 of the series, we started off by looking at the basics of search engine ranking and search engine optimization. In Part 2, we talked about my favorite tool to help analyze user statistics on your site, Google Analytics. Today, we’ll cover more tools to analyze your site data, but they will analyze the content on your site, not the visitors like Google Analytics does. Taking a good look at your site’s backend structure to see what search engines see is a good way to fully optimize your site, and there are tons of helpful resources out there to help you.

Website Grader

This site is free and immensely helpful. You enter in your url and it gives you a detailed rundown of everything behind the scenes. It tallies up all your points, and gives your site a grade, showing how well your site is optimized. It also gives you all sorts of fun data all in one place. It lists your headings, images, and metadata. It also tells you the site’s Google Page Rank, the Alexa traffic ranking, and the amount of incoming links. It tells you if it finds missing items that may help SEO on your site like metadata, image titles, and a blog. All in all, it’s one great tool.

SEO Tools by SEOmoz

There are lots of helpful tools in here, many of them free, although some of the more in-depth ones may be used for a small fee. The list of tools includes: Trifecta (measures the popularity of your domain), GeoTargeting Detection (measures how well your site is targeted toward specific country’s search engines), Linkscape (tracks all incoming links and their quality), and Term Target (measures how targeted a page is for a specific keyword). Many more tools are available as well.

ClickHeat

You can download this tool for free and it generates a heat map, showing you where users click most on your site. This is helpful if you have call to action buttons or some tool on your site that you’d like to check the success of. It can also reveal if people are confused by your site and are clicking odd places in your site thinking they are clickable, but aren’t.

Google Page Rank Checker

This is helpful for generating your Google Page Rank, as well as a few other rankings. If you aren’t interested in reading through the other information in the more detailed tools above, this is a good one for checking your rankings.

Keyword Density Analyzer

As I mentioned before in the SEO series, Google doesn’t care about your keywords in your metadata. They do care about keywords distributed throughout your site, and this tool does a great job of telling you which words are more prominent in your content. This will help you determine if you’ve included enough content on the keywords you think are most relevant. If you’re a jeweler and you only mention the word diamond once, you may need to add some more pages and relevant content.

These tools are very helpful in analyzing your site and gathering the data behind the scenes to deliver to you. It’s important to stay up to date on your site and what can be improved upon. Once your site has been built, it shouldn’t be left to sit, but rather analyzed and continually updated to be the best site for you that it can be. I hope this list provides a good starting point, and a great push to start looking at your site’s data. What are your favorite tools to use to analyze your site statistics and data?