Well I’m somewhat organized in my new house now, so I thought I would try and get back to some meaningful blogging. I thought I would share with you some nice tools that can give some easy quick stats on your websites. I’ve been using these and find them really helpful when I want some quick information about my sites without having to dive into my web analytics program of choice.

dnScoop.com – This is kind of a cool fun site to look at on occasion. Basically it takes several factors of your site and based upon them if gives you an estimated value of what it predicts your website is worth. Some of the factors it analyzes are domain age, pagerank, inbound links, alexa rank, and number of index pages. Based on these criteria it also gives an estimate of what a link on your site is worth through TextLink Ads. I guess for me honestly this neat tool is just kind of fun to look at every now an then because its kind of fun to see how different factors can affect the perceived value of your site.

Xinu Returns – This is a really great tool that can give you alot of great information about your site in a very short amount of time. All you need to do is enter in your url and let the tool gather all of the information. Some of the info that it returns includes domain information, ranking info from pagerank to technorati, syndication information, social bookmark info, validation info, index pages count, and backlink information across a variety of sites. I’ve become a big fan of this site because of the amount of information I can get about my site in a short amount of time and I highly recommend taking a look at it.

Serph.com- Serph is actually another creation from ACS the same company that built CrazyEgg and as you know I’m a big fan of that. Basically Serph is a social media search engine that searches social media sites to see what people are saying on the web right now. I’ve found it useful when I search for some information regarding ClarkeW.com and I can see the sites or people that have stuff referencing content on my site. This is just another fun tool to see what is being said out in the social media world about you or another topic your interested in searching for.

Well there is a quick list of 3 sites that I find useful for my own sites, so hopefully you’ll be able to get something useful out of them as well. I do highly recommend checking each of the sites out, as you can get some great information out of all of them. If you do end up trying some of them out, let me know what you think.

I’ve been a big fan of Crazy Egg ever since I started using it last fall to monitor my landing page effectiveness.  Well the other day I went to login to my account and I saw a notice to check out the new Confetti view on my campaigns.  Once I logged in and saw this new feature I was really impressed.

In a nutshell it gives a very nice rich colorful view of every one of the clicks that occurred on your page.  In addition to that you can filter the clicks down by certain types of criteria inclucing top referrer, top keywords, browser type, time to click, operating system, and many others as well.  Its definitely another nice added feature to an already great product.  If you haven’t started using Crazy Egg to track some of your sites, I highly suggest that you do.  Just by taking the information I’ve received from it in addition to my web analytics reports, it has definitely saved me alot of time and money.

I came across HitTail the other day and decided to sign up for it to give it a try. Basically you install a snippet of code on your website and HitTail monitors all incoming search traffic to your site. You can see where specific search queries and every unique keyword that is used to find your site. It really helps out to find out the long-tail keywords that visitors are using to find your site. It can give you the opportunity to capitalize on this long-tail traffic that probably has a very good chance of converting.

I’ve been running the free version of the service for a few days now and I’m really impressed so far. It is nice to watch in real-time the keyword queries that are being used to access my sites. Based on some of the data I’ve been seeing, I’ve actually made some changes on my content to try and increase conversions. Based on the data it gathers, HitTail also makes suggestions on certain keywords that you should target on your sites. I guess you could get this same data from your web analytics package, but it is hard to beat the real-time access that HitTail offers.

The best part about HitTail is that it is free for the basic edition if your site experiences under 100,000 visits per month and if you want more features you can get the plus version for onlyy $4.95 a month until April 30th. If you get a chance go sign up for HitTail and see if it helps your search efforts for your site.

I have been looking for a plugin that would allow me to view my Google Analytics stats directly in WordPress without logging into my Adwords account.  Well after some searching I found this really cool WordPress plugin that Joe Tan created.  Not only does it allow you to see your Google Analytics stats in WordPress it also allows you to see your Feedburner traffic as well.

Installation is simple, just download the plugin and activate it in WordPress.  Once you have the plugin activated just fill in your user account information for Google Analytics and Feedburner and then just wait for your traffic data to start coming in.

 If you are looking for a quick way to check your traffic stats in WordPress then I highly recommend this great plugin. 

I’m always looking for new ways to improve the visitor experience on my websites I deal with and manage on a daily basis.  Recently I started using a tool called Crazyegg that gives great statistics of how your visitors are clicking and interacting with your site.   I had heard of the service previously, but was not sure what it was all about until I was listening to Jeremy Shoemaker’s radio show NetIncome and Neil Patel the founder was a guest talking about the service.

After the show I decided to sign up for the service and give it a try since they have a free option available for up to 5,000 visits a month.  Once you sign up it is extremely easy to get a page loaded to begin tracking.  Really the only thing that needs to be done on your part is to insert a small bit of tracking code on your site and that is it.

Once your page has received some traffic you can check your dashboard in Crazyegg to see how your visitors have clicked on that particular page on the site.  When you view the statistics there are a few options available to choose from.

• Overlay - Shows and overlay of your page with markers detailing just what links were clicked by visitors.
• List - Displays a popup showing a list of all links that were clicked on that page.
• Heatmap (My favorite option) – The heatmap shows an overlay of the page with different hotspots that show the exact area of the link that was clicked by the visitor.

I have been using Crazyegg for the last month and have to say that it has become an invaluable tool for me to measure the effectiveness of certain pages on my sites.   I mainly use it to test PPC landing pages and it has given me some great data to use.  I have made some changes to my sites based on this data and I have seen some great increases in conversion rates.  I love the heatmap feature and it has been a great tool to analyze if certain ads on my page were performing like I expected them to.  Mainly I think the service is great to quickly test out multiple options for your sites and see what works best to accomplish your goals.

Overall Crazyegg is a great tool to use since they have a free option available and if you go over the 5,000 visits allowed they have some very affordable plans up from that.  If you ever wondered how your visitors are interacting with your site, go checkout Crazyegg and give them a try, as it is valuable service.