This page is a list of freely available tools which help to get feedback for your web site. It's a mixture of freely available SEO (Search engine optimization) and ranking services. It's suitable for the typical enthusiast who's operating a low volume, non profit, least cost web site.
Alexa.com
Example: www.scalingbits.com
Information provided
- World wide traffic rank
- Country specific traffic rank
- time on site
- pageviews per user
Assessment
Pro | Contra |
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Comment
The site belongs to Amazon.
The tracking is based on a browser tool bar which has to be installed by users. All ratings will be based on this data. This means that the data tracked will depens a lot on the willingness of your target audience to install this tool bar. Low volume sites will most likely see strong fluctuations due to the small number of tracked users for a given site.
Netcraft.com
Example: www.scalingbits.com
Information provided
- Site rank
- The date the site went online
- Uptime graph
- Operating System of site
- web server of site
- hosting history
Assessment
Pro | Contra |
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Comment
The site is focusing more on professional customers.
The tracking is based on a browser tool bar which has to be installed by users. All rating will be based on this data. This means that the data tracked depends a lot on the willingness of your target audience to install this tool bar. Low volume sites will most likely see strong fluctuations due to the small number of tracked users for a given site.
seitwert.de
This site is a german language site.
Example. www.scalingbits.com
Information provided
- site rank (out of ~600.000 tracked sites) based on a mix of criteria
- Google rating
- Google page rank
- back links
- matching of page titles search results ranks
- Yahoo links
- Alexa rating including country information (3 month, 1 month, 1 week, 1 day rating)
- Visibility for search engines
- check for key words
- check for meta descriptions
- check for robots meta tag
- WC3 Validation with html quality assessment of site
- Social bookmarks
- number of references from wikipedia
- time the site is available on the web
- Google rating
Assessment
Pro | Contra |
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Comment
It tracks the number of requests being made and blocks the free access after a dozen of queries (Understandable and accepted behavior, no complaints!).
seitwert.de is currently my preferred checking site.
Google Webmaster Tools
Information provided
- Goggle queries which point to your site
- Number of queries per day
- popular pages (based on queries)
- popular key words
- website response times (web crawler response times
Services offered
- Management of web site XML index (pages not be crawled, key words, recrawling frequency etc)
Assessment
Pro | Contra |
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Comment
Valuable alternative to Google Analytics without the down side of Google Analytics (Google Analytics requires you to instrument your site in such a way that you run a program on your visitors browser. This program gives you information about the user of which he/she is most likely not to be aware of).
Google Webmaster tools are more relevant for sites which rely on Google queries. These will be most likely sites with longer lasting content. Blogging sites typically don't draw that many Google queries. They tend to rely more on RSS subscribers.
Google Analytics
is the mother of all analytical tools...
Information provided
- how many users
- watch which web page
- move on to which web page
- watch which page for how long
- come from which domain
- and much more...
Assessment
Pro | Contra |
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Comment
Google Analytics is probably the most popular and most commonly used tool.
I'm not using it for ethical reasons. The Google Analytics privacy paragraph in the license agreement states that the site will have to let the user know that the site is instrumented with Google code which sends back data to Google.
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