Do you know how much traffic your website has? Do you know what are the most common search keywords or phrases used to get to your website? If you sell on your website, do you know how many visitors convert to paying customers?

These are all questions you should be asking about your website.

There are many tools available to help you answer these questions, and a lot of them are free.

Website Grader
Website Grader will evaluate the key factors on your site that many search engines use for determining your ranking on search results. The resulting report will also offer suggestions where possible to help improve your website.

The Website Grader site is really easy to use. You enter your website address and email (to receive the final report) and away it goes evaluating the site for a number of key factors, including:

• The use of Meta Tags (keywords and descriptions)
• Image ALT tags which are helpful for search engines along with page readers used by the visually impaired
• Readability Level – This can be very helpful in ensuring your message is readable by your target audience.
• Google Statistics including page rank, indexed pages and inbound links. These are all factors in determining where your website is displayed in Google search results.
• Competitor Information – You can also provide the website addresses of some of your competitors and Website Grader will retrieve some high-level information about their website for comparison purposes.

Overall, Website Grader helps you determine what areas of your site need a little extra work to ensure the search engines not only find your website but also position your site above your competitors in organic searches.

Google Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools is an invaluable tool for anyone who is responsible for driving traffic to a website.

The Webmaster Tools show you what Google knows about your site. You can see what errors Google encounters when it crawls your website. For those that are trying to fine-tune keywords, you can see the top searches used by people to find your website, keyword ranking based on your site’s content as well as external links to your website.

In addition to providing information about your site, Google Webmaster Tools also provides various tools to help you improve search engine interaction including sitemap submission.

One final note about the Webmaster Tools, you have to be able to verify access to the website itself before you can access this information about your site. It can be as a simple as putting a file with a specific name on the web site. Once access is verified, you can uncover a wealth of information about your site.

Google Analytics
Google Analytics offers a suite of features that can help you report on website traffic through a combination of listings and graphs.

Analytics requires a small bit of code to be added to every page on your website that you would like to monitor. As each page is requested by a website visitor, the visit is essentially logged using the added code and tracked. The collected information can then be used by you to monitor activity including:

• Visitor information (visits, pages per visit, new vs. returning visitors, etc…)
• Geographic information – where are the visitors coming from
• Source information – how are visitors finding your website (i.e. search engines, links on external sites or direct traffic)
• Browser Capabilities – Are your visitors using Internet Explorer or something else? Find out what add-ins are generally supported as well as what screen resolutions your visitors are using. This information is important for design considerations as well as custom programming technologies supported.

By no means is this a comprehensive list of tools available to help you with your website. These are just a few that we have used and have been happy with the value and information received from them.

You don't have to be a whiz-bang programmer type to use these tools either. They are user friendly and have forums available for posting questions as well.

InnoTech does not have any direct connection with any of these tools, but we have found them useful and thought you might too.