Jon Bishop » Analytics

Competitor Website Reports and Analytics

Jon Bishop — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 07:05:48 +0000

Sometimes the best way to learn how to do something on the Internet is to check and see how other people are already doing it. Here is a small collection of tools I use to learn more about other websites. You should obviously already be using Google Analytics on your own site on top of whatever other tracking scripts you are using. This is just a list of tools you can plug any web address into and learn all about that site. Each tool does something a bit different so explore and play around a bit.

Traffic and Visibility

Alexa.com
Alexa provides information about websites including Top Sites, Internet Traffic Stats and Metrics, Related Links, Online Reviews Contact Information and Search Analytics for SEM and SEO optimization.

Compete.com
Compete helps you benefit from click-sharing by providing free services that create a more trusted, transparent, and valuable Internet.

quantcast.com
A new breed of measurement service helping buyers and sellers quantify the characteristics of digital audiences against which they can activate addressable advertising solutions.

quarkbase.com
See people, traffic data, similar sites, social comments, description, social popularity and much more about websites.

Xinureturns.com
Check PageRank, Backlinks, Indexed Pages, Rankings and more.

SEO

Open Site Explorer via SEOMoz
Linkscape provides link data never available before on over 41+ billion URLs across 366+ million domains.

Term Extractor via SEOMoz
This tool analyzes the content of a given page and extracts the terms that appear to be targeted at search engines. It applies certain weights to HTML elements and other on-page factors to determine what it thinks is a targeted term.

Website Grader via HubSpot
Free SEO tool that provides an Internet Marketing Report for your website.

SEO Analysis Tool via SEOWorkers.com
This SEO Analysis Tool is to help you analyze and measure the ranking potential of your web pages.

MarkosWeb.com
A web service that collects and analyzes any data about domains and keywords they are optimized for.

Keyword Monitoring and Discovery

KeywordSpy.com
SEO & PPC Keyword Research software tool, that unveil your competitors’ most profitable Ad copies & keywords.

SpyFu.com
Spy on your online competitors. Download competitors keywords and adwords.

SEMRush.com
SEMRush.com is a another great competitive research tool.

Social

Blog Grader via HubSpot
Blog Grader provide a free tool to grade your Blog and provide recommendations on how to improve its effectiveness.

HowSociable.com
HowSociable provides a simple way for you to begin measuring your brand’s visibility on the social web.

SocialWebsiteAnalyzer.com
Monitoring the social presence of your website on the top 20 social media websites.

Speed and Other Site Information

BuiltWith
Web technology information profiler tool. Find out what a site is using.

Web Page Analyzer via Websiteoptimization.com
Calculate page size, composition, and download time.

Readability.info
Readability.info offers readability scores, style, grammar, school paper analysis, readability scores (Kincaid, ARI, Coleman-Liau, Flesch, Fog, Lix and SMOG) for Web pages.

If your favorite tool isn’t listed please share it in the comments.

7 WordPress Plugins That Add Functionality To Your Dashboard

Jon Bishop — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 07:16:33 +0000

There are thousands of great plugins to help modify your WordPress installation in almost any way imaginable. I wanted to focus a bit more on those plugins that took advantage of the WordPress dashboard to bring information and functionality to a page that sometimes doesn’t get the attention it deserves. I’ve used most of these plugins on assorted projects in the past and the others I just found and thought I would share.

If you know of any other cool plugins that make use of the WordPress dashboard please share in the comments.

WP-Stats-Dashboard

Display your blog’s stats graph plus your blog traffic, social engagement and social influence directly in your dashboard. See how you’re ranking on Alexa, check out your Technorati authority, monitor your ranking across multiple sites and much more. Once you install this plugin you’ll wonder how you ever managed to track your social media worth without it.

WordPress Stats

There are hundreds of plugins and services which can provide statistics about your visitors. However I found that even though something like Google Analytics provides an incredible depth of information, it can be overwhelming and doesn’t really highlight what’s most interesting to me as a writer. That’s why Automattic created its own stats system, to focus on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provide them in a clear and concise interface.

Easily navigate pages on dashboard

Display a folder tree of your pages that is easy to expand and contract on your Dashboard. Designed for people that use WordPress as a content management system.

Facebook Dashboard

This plug-in addes the Facebook for iGoogle gadget (published by Google) to your WordPress dashboard.

Meet Your Commenters

When someone comments on your blog and writes a comment with his/her URL, is leaving more information than you think. This plugin displays web pages and profiles of those users in the dashboard, so you can add them as friends if you are in the same social network.

List Rank Dashboard Widget

Displays the rankings of a configurable list of sites in a dashboard widget. Includes a shortcode to display individual rankings in post, pages and sidebar widgets.

WordPress Easy ToDo

Create a To Do list on the WordPress Dashboard. This tool is very interesting if you’re writing posts with several authors.

This is just a small sampling of plugins that add widgets to the WordPress dashboard but I thought they were plugins worth noting.

Twitter Metrics

Jon Bishop — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 22:45:25 +0000