So Site Analysis is becoming very important nowdays. Its important if you want to track where your own website is heading towards or even want to find about any other site. These type of information is very useful if you want to buy a website and want a complete detail of that website so that you don’t feel cheated afterwards. Well I am going to list a few useful tools which will help you analyse a site completely and will give you as much information as you need about the specific website. So here is the list of tools :
- Whois.DomainTools.com - This website will provide you with information of the domain of the website and you can know about the owner of the domain, registrar of domain and details like domain registered and expiry date. To find this information quickly without visiting the site often just type whois.sc/website.com in your browser where website.com refers to the url you are investigating. (Don’t worry…Whois.sc was the old domain for whois.domaintools.com website as DomainTools.com acquired Whois.sc sometime back.)
- Whoishostingthis.com - After checking on domain you would now want to find about the hosting company where its actually hosted. Use this website to find out where the website is currently hosted. The tricky part is that it won’t tell the exact webhost always since it will find the servers where website is currently located. And for most of the part servers and webhost differ too much. You will never see Hostgator as the webhost listed but ThePlanet instead of it since Hostgator has its servers located at ThePlanet Data Centers. Shortcut to find information is to append the url at end of the domainname just as done for whois.
- BuiltWith.com - After finding the webhost and registrar, you would want to know what technologies are being used to make that site. For that builtwith.com is a perfect tool. It tells about the webserver technology, additional programming techniques, analytics tools used, monetisation methods employed, widgets used, aggregation functionality and even document encoding used. Shortcut key is builtwith.com/?website.com
- Now after this you must be dying to know about the kind of traffic the site gets. Well nobody publishes real traffic details on their website clearly or if they do even then you might not believe it unless you see it with your own eyes. So here are few traffic tools listed.
- Alexa Ranks - the most untrusted method but still very widely used. Alexa ranks are based mostly on their toolbar users or websites which uses alexa badges. Recently Alexa clarified they have started employing other methods too but god knows what they are. Shortcut url is http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/website.com
- Compete.com - One the most accurate webtraffic url and that’s why very less used since it exposes thing bigtime! :evil: Shortcut url is http://siteanalytics.compete.com/website.com/
- Quantcast - Again a useful tool but still falls short of Compete. Shortcut url is quantcast.com/website.com
- Technorati - Yes this can also prove to be a good measure of traffic of a site. But its more useful in cases of blogs. Shortcut key is technorati.com/blogs/website.com - Count the number of reactions for traffic estimate and check the authority for popularity of the blog.
- Incoming Links - Another useful metric to check the popularity and hence the traffic of a site. But incoming links differ for both Google and Yahoo! Search Engines. Live Search does not support any incoming link query at the moment. To check in Google, use this query: link:example.com and for Yahoo! Search engine just go to https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/new and type the name of the website as http://www.website.com and you will get the number of inlinks mentioned there. You can also use a free tool available here.
- RSS Feed Subscribers - Works only for feedburner feeds. Most websites even if they publish feeds via feedburner still hide their feedcount or some others fake their counts. To check for yourself their feedcount is to use this url: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/feedname? - where feedname is the feedburner name of the feed. Get it from feed url for example feedname for http://feeds.feedburner.com/nspeaks would be nspeaks. But for this method their feed subscription chicklet should be activated and if its not, you can’t use this method.
- WebsiteGrader.com -Now its time to rank the sites. Websitegrader.com ranks site on basis of SEO Strategy used. Shortcut url is - actually there is none. Go to their homepage and put the url manually.
- WebsiteValued.com - Now we come to actually find what value the site would be. Well this is more of a custom tool if you are the owner. And actually helps the site owners if they are listing their site for sale. Shortcut url is http://websitevalued.com/?website.com
- Aboutus.org - This website generates information using various tools mentioned above. But best part is that siteowner can redesign their site information pages to reveal a whole lot of information. Shorcut url is http://www.aboutus.org/website.com
- DnScoop.com - After evaluating a website, its time to evaluate a domain name if you want to put it for sale. Check value of domain here at Dnscoop. Shorcut url is - no shortcut url.
- What’s your Blog’s worth - Last but not the least - again a tool to measure a blog’s value since it uses Technorati API. Very inflated if you ask me. And you can modify your ranking badge easily!
So now you can sit back and use each and every tool to extract every possible information you wanted. BTW just for fun if you want to go back in time and check how sites looked in their past….Use Wayback Machine. I suggest you to check google.com and microsoft.com back in 1998 and 1996 repectively. Also I really miss Silktide SiteScore which used to be a free tool earlier. It provided ranking of a site based on site’s design. Now its a paid tool. Check it out at Silktide. If you have the money and a big site, do use Sitescore. It should have improved a lot. But I don’t have the money to test that tool. BTW I am not mentioning google pagerank as mentioned for the reasons here.