If you own a web site or design web sites for companies, you should be checking site performance on a regular basis.  It’s the only way to know objectively if you are on track towards improving your search ranking and keyword placement, and thus getting a positive return with your online marketing efforts.

Of course, once your visitors arrive at your site, your site needs to have well constructed “calls to action” and entice visitors to make the next step of buying your products or contacting you, but let’s leave that to a future blog post.

Below are 5 tools I use on a regular basis to measure how my web sites are doing.  Each has it’s own purpose which I describe below.

WebsiteGrader.com – an indispensable tool and the one I use most often it gives you Pagerank, counts inbound links, and tells you other details about your site you might not have thought about (like 301 redirects or domain expiration)

BacklinkWatch.com – get excellent insight into what links are pointing to your site. The report also tells you if the links have “nofollow” (something a lot of bloggers are adding into their comment widgets)

Quarkbase.com – get info about things like your Alexa rank, what tools were used to build your site as well as some general traffic and ranking data.

URLtrends.com – An incredible amount of information far beyond all the other tools mentioned so far.  However, the page navigation is terrible and the bar graphs produced are cryptic and hard to decipher.  Nevertheless the data is significant and you can come up with plenty of ideas on site improvements from the data here.

LinkPopularity.com – this last tool doesn’t do much more than give you 3 links to view your search indexing progress at the big 3 (Google, MSN, Yahoo).  It’s handy when you want to quickly see how well your site is being ranked.

NEW! TestEverything.com – this one is new and one I just found from sitepoint.com.  I haven’t tried it yet, but it covers an extensive list of possible tools to literally test everything about your site.  I will post a review in the future about it.  If you have used testeverything.com, let me know and give me your opinion.

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