Understanding how users find, see, and interact with your website is a great way to improve your content, design, and navigation. Understanding your site will help you craft a better user experience.

There are several tools on the web that can expose telling data about your site. Below are 5 tools which will help you analyze your site.

Website Grader

http://www.websitegrader.com
Website Grader is a free seo tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.

SEO Analyzer

http://raven-seo-tools.com/seo-analyzer/
This tool will show you the structure of your pages and help you achieve higher search engine rankings.

Summit Media’s Spider Simulator

http://tools.summitmedia.co.uk/spider/
This service provides you with a report on aspects of the page that are used to determine how highly in a search engine the page is ranked, and also gives some general usability feedback.

PageRank Checker For Your Backlinks

http://www.smartpagerank.com/pagerank-backlinks.php
This tool will output sites linking in and will list each of the links PageRank. You can also list out the links that have a nofollow attribute.

Crazy Egg

http://crazyegg.com
Create tests to figure out what people are doing on your website. This service presents the results using three different methods: Overlays, Lists and Heatmaps. The free version allows your to test 4 pages simultaneously and up to 5,000 visits per month.

Browser Shots

http://browsershots.org
Browsershots is a free service that makes screenshots of your web design in several different browsers.

W3C Markup Validation

http://validator.w3.org
Validating your documents is an important step which can dramatically help improve and ensure your documents quality.

Google Analytics

http://www.google.com/analytics/
Google Analytics offers a host of compelling features from keyword and campaign comparison to funnel visualization. This service is free and easy to implement.

Mint

http://haveamint.com
Mint is a self-hosted web site analytics program that offers information on your users, referrals, geo-mapping and much more.

DNS Scoop

http://www.dnscoop.com
Although DNS Scoop’s main intent is to value a domain, it provides some good info on Pagerank, traffic, and links pointing to your domain.

Technorati Tags: Findability, SEO, Tools

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