Google often changes its algorithm. In February 2012 alone, Google released upto 40 algorithm updates. In the month of March, it again released another 50 updates.

The main aim of these updates is to weed out the lower-quality websites that do not satisfy the searchers with good quality content. Eventhough Google freely talks about this, there is still some secrecy behind how exactly the master search engine, Google evaluates every website and eventually determines which sites should show for which search queries.

Many tools are available to analyze a website from SEO perspective. It allows you to look at your website the way Google sees it. But before we start to discuss about the list of tools that helps you analyze your website, I would like to share some useful tips to check and analyze a website manually without using any tools.

Here are a few manual website analysis tips:

• First check for the robots.txt file. Does it exist? If it exists, check whether it is properly coded.

• Next, check out the canonical issue problem on your website.

• Then check out the web page content; whether it is unique or not.

• After that, check for the Alt tags and Meta tags; whether they are properly done.

• Then look out for the sitemap and video sitemap (if you use video on your website).

• Look out for link building consistency over time. Check the total number of backlinks and from where they are coming.

• Make sure the anchor text is varied and not focused too much on your primary keywords.

• Check out for top backlinks to your website. Check out their quality; whether they are coming from good websites with PageRank not less than 0.

• Make sure all the links and pages in your website are easy to find.

• Look out for HTML coding and validation. Check whether header tags are used properly on your website.

• If your website encounters 404 pages issue, optimize that immediately.

• Finally, make sure only trusted people are aware of your website address.

Always analyze your website from the above mentioned perspectives. Alternatively, you can take advantage of tools to analyze the site. Many paid and free tools are available. Below, I have discussed some best tools.

SEO tools to analyze a website:

1. Google Webmaster Tools:

Even though many search engines are available, Google plays a major role and rules the internet. As a result, Google Webmaster Tools is great for search engine optimization analysis of a website because it gives you direct access to some of the Google’s information about your website.

The Google Webmaster Tools is extremely helpful in analyzing which keywords Google searches for when it crawls your site. It gives helpful hints to improve your rankings and CTR in search engines.

Apart from this, it helps to break down the crawling and malware errors. Actually, malware blocks your website and crawl errors will stop the search spiders in their track, due to which your website will be invisible to search engines. By using Google Webmaster Tool, you can monitor the errors and rectify the problems.

Google Webmaster Tool presents the information of your website under 5 categories.

1. Configuration (It allows you to configure your Google Webmaster Tool account).

2. Health (It displays the malware and crawling errors found on your site).

3. Traffic (This category shows the backlinks, search queries and the +1s of your website).

4. Optimization (This part helps you to progress your website indexing and content).

5. Labs (This last part gives the experimental features).

2. Google Analytics:

Next to Google Web Master Tool, Google Analytics is best to analyze your website for SEO. Once you create an account in Google Analytics, it will ask you to insert few lines of Javascript on your website.

Once the code is in place, you can monitor your website traffic through Google interface. Basically, the interface is divided into 5 broad sections.

1. Audience (This section will show information about the people visiting your website).

2. Advertising (It reveals the information about advertising campaigns of your website).

3. Traffic sources (This section will give information about the traffic of your website).

4. Content (This part reveals the information about the most popular pages of your website).

5. Conversions (It will give information about sales conversions and goal completions of your company).

3. WooRank:

This tool offers instant review of your website. Without a premium account, you are allowed to generate one free report per week. Also, it offers a free unlimited trial for 7-days. Once you are satisfied with the trial, you can purchase this tool by spending $49/month.

The report is divided into 12 sections.

1. Top 5 priorities:

It gives the most significant action or items of your website.

2. Visitors:

It reveals the information about your website traffic and audience demographics.

3. Social Monitoring:

It will summarize the popularity of your website on the social networks. It even reproduces social information like latest tweets, shares and likes on Facebook, LinkedIn profile information, etc.

4. Mobile:

This section will reveal the mobile version of your website. Your site’s adherence to mobile optimization best practices is also evaluated.

5. SEO Content:

The on-page elements like title, meta description, etc. of your website are evaluated on this page.

6. SEO Basics:

This part will analyze whether your website follow the best practices of SEO like XML Sitemap usage, Canonicalization, etc.

7. SEO Authority:

This section will summarize the site’s authority using PageRank, registration dates, site’s indexibility, etc.

8. SEO Keywords:

It will show the site’s most important keywords and corresponding competitors for that particular keyword.

9. SEO Backlinks:

Your website backlinks are displayed in this part.

10. Security:

Various security related metrics are displayed here, which includes blacklists, spams, Google’s safe browsing API, etc.

11. Usability:

You can see your usability factors like 404 error page, page’s size and load time of your website in this section.

12. Technologies:

This part illustrates miscellaneous aspects of your website. It includes speed optimizations, W3C standards compliance, etc.