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Top 5 Tools to Analyze Your Website

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When you manage a website there are some things that you need to know. For example, might it be a good idea to ask yourself questions such as; is the site effective and does it accomplish what it should? Getting answers to such questions is not always the easiest thing in the world. That is – at least not if you haven’t looked at any website statistics. Thankfully there are several great tools on the market that can help you understand how your website is performing. If you know this, you’ll be able to optimize and make the site more sticky and converting. To help you get started we’ll list what we believe to be the top 5 tools to analyze your website.

1. SEO Analyzer:

The SEO Design Analyzer from Raven is free to use and it will give you tons of useful information. Simply type in your URL and you’ll get the data you need to get a good understanding of what you’re doing right and what needs to be better optimized. It’s all very easy and it only takes seconds to get the results.

Some of the information that you’ll get to know are the download time, obsolete HTML, inline styles and at the end you’ll get an overall score for the design. One big plus with this tool is that it covers as good as every area of an average SEO process. If you really want the best of the best you might want to take a look at the SEO Pro version. It will cost you $100 a month but the features that are included could very well be worth it – depending on your requirements. Take advantage of this tool and create a user friendly site with top conversion.

This is perhaps not a web analytics tool in its full meaning as it’s probably better explained as a log analyzer. Nevertheless it is very useful and as it’s an open source program, it’s free to download and use. Due to, or thanks to, its popularity, it comes in several different languages, making it easlily accessible for people all over the world.

What it actually does is “generating advanced web, streaming, ftp or mail server statistics graphically” in a HTML report. AWStats surely will give you everything you might be looking for in a statistics tool. Most log file formats are supported by AWStats – such as Apache, IIS (W3C) and WebStar. Take advantage of this tool and get an easy overview of who your visitors are, what search engines they’re using and what time of day they’re visiting your site.

2. Website Grader:

The Website Grader is somewhat similar to SEO Analyzer and it will also provide you with all the necessary data you need to optimize your site. It’s free to use and we must say that we are impressed with the detailed data that appears after only a couple of seconds. Even though your site might be strong, it will always have some weak links that could be worth improving.

Some of the results that you get are heading summary, image summary, number of del.ici.ous bookmarks, on page SEO and off page SEO. Are you for example using too many images and not enough metadata? Website Grader can help you understand all these things for free and when done you can show your visitors the site’s score, with a badge from Website Grader. Try it out – we think that you might really like this tool.

3. AWStats:
This is perhaps not a web analytics tool in its full meaning as it’s probably better explained as a log analyzer. Nevertheless it is very useful and as it’s an open source program, it’s free to download and use. Due to, or thanks to, its popularity, it comes in several different languages, making it easlily accessible for people all over the world.

What it actually does is “generating advanced web, streaming, ftp or mail server statistics graphically” in a HTML report. AWStats surely will give you everything you might be looking for in a statistics tool. Most log file formats are supported by AWStats – such as Apache, IIS (W3C) and WebStar. Take advantage of this tool and get an easy overview of who your visitors are, what search engines they’re using and what time of day they’re visiting your site.

4. Crazy Egg:

The Crazy Egg tool comes in three different versions; standard, plus and pro. The standard version is free and the others cost a bit, but they are in no way pricey. With the help of this tool you’ll be able to see what your visitors are doing on your site – right down to their precise mouse movements. In fact, what we loved the most about this tool is the heatmap.

With the heatmap you’ll be able to see what’s hot and what’s not on your site via an image showing you where your visitors are the most active – every click by your users is recorded. Its simple design makes it very user-friendly as well. The standard version will give you plenty of useful info but if you really want to dig into the core of your site, we would recommend you to pay for the plus or pro version.

5. Mint:

The Mint analytics tool will cost you $30 per site but it will be money well spent. With Mint you’ll get data such as number of visits, unique referrers, most popular pages and much, much more. As this is a tool that you’ll have to pay for, you can expect a little extra – and we can promise you that it will deliver. Mint uses a plugin system, called Pepper, which allows adding extra extensibility to your base script.

We understand that it might seem unnecessary to pay for something that you can get for free elsewhere but remember that $30 is still a cheap way of getting that much data and your site is worth all the attention it can get. All-in-all, mint is a very good analyzing tool.

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This is a guest post written by Chris Reynolds from Web Hosting Search. Chris is a writer, developer and an enthusiastic designer who loves to blog about the hosting industry and has a special interest for website analytics. WHS is a well respected guide on trustworthy hosting providers worldwide and their reviews range from simple cheap hosting to more advanced dedicated hosting solutions.

Tags: analyze your site, awstats, mint, website grader