There are many websites and tools on the Internet to measure the popularity of your website or analyse your competitors. These sites provide useful statistics about your own website as well as other leading websites in your niche.

I have compiled a list of top 7 sites below that offer a great way to monitor the performance websites and get an in-depth insight into consumer search behaviour and trends.  The information will give you a deeper insight into your own website and will also assist you in planning your strategy for the growth and development of your website. The information on search terms will help you to target or bid on the right keywords.

1. Alexa.com

Alexa provides free traffic metrics, search analytics, demographics, and more for websites and blogs. The website includes a site information tool that offers valuable information about your website as well as competitors. It offers detailed information on traffic statistics, search analytics, demographics, links and click stream. It displays the Top Search Queries for any website along with other potential high impact queries.

In addition to site information, Alexa offers a number of useful tools and information on its website. It publishes a list of hot topics on the internet that is updated every 5 minutes. It also publishes a list of top 500 websites globally, by country and category. An in-depth SEO site analysis is also available.

• It is completely free.
• No need to install any tracking code.

2. Technorati

Technorati provides valuable information for blogs and social media sites. It is the leading blog search engine and also provides information on popularity of blogs, posts and topics. It is excellent for tracking conversations or to find out posts in terms of popularity. It also published a list of top blogs. Its ranking system known as Technorati authority has become one of the most popular ratings for measuring the value of blogs.

• Free to use.
• No need to install any tracking code.

3. Yahoo! Site Explorer

Site Explorer allows you to explore all the websites indexed by Yahoo! Search. You can view the most popular pages from any website, dive into a comprehensive site map, and find pages that link to that site or any page. The “Inlinks” feature shows you detail about web pages that link back to the particular URL you are exploring. It can provide you an insight into how popular a website is.

• Free to use
• No Tracking code required

4. Quantcast .Com

Quantcast offers free direct audience measurement for all website owners including traffic, demographics, business, lifestyle, interests and more. You can install its tracking code and use to track detailed website statistics for your website or blog, similar to Google analytics. In addition, It also allows you to access and compare audience reports of approximately one million websites and services.

Quantcast is currently used by top media agencies, publishers and marketers  to define, buy, or sell the audiences that matters to them most.

5. Compete

Provides a Web-based consumer intelligence service that offers companies time-sensitive analysis of web users’ consumer behaviour. It provides detailed site statistics and audience profile. Site statistics include unique visitors, page views, average no. of pages visited. Audience profile includes information on where your visitors come from, their age group, gender and ethnicity.

It also provides ranked list of top 10 websites based on unique visits, page views or total time spent on sites.

6. Nielsen Net Ratings | Nielsen-online .Com

Covering 70 percent of the world’s Internet usage, Nielsen//NetRatings is one of the leading standard for Internet audience measurement and analysis. It offers a wide range of paid and free digital media research reports and its data is used by leading media and advertising companies. It is particularly useful for analysing large websites. Some of the free reports available on its website includes the top 10 web parent companies, top 10 video sites and top 10 search providers. Their monthly newsletter is useful to keep up with the latest online trends and figures.

7. Hitwise Data Centre

Hitwise monitor 50 million search terms every week and provide a valuable insight into online consumer behaviour patterns. Each day, Hitwise provides insights on how 8 million UK Internet users interact with more than 1 million websites, across 165+ industries.

Hitwise provides information on exactly what your potential customers are searching for, both in organic and paid searches. This information can help you to create or modify content on your site or bid on the right keywords of you use pay par click campaigns like Google Adwords.

You can access valuable information from various sections on its website including data Centre section that provides a range of data including a list of the top 20 search engines, top 20 websites per industry, top 10 search terms per industry, etc. Other useful sections include Reports, Webinars, Case Studies and Top 10 Awards.

Bonus Tool: popuri.us/

Although this tool provides very basic statistics, I have included it in my list due to its simplicity and ease of use. It does not provide details demographics or information on visitors. It simply displays information the link popularity of any website based on some of the commonly used ranking methods including Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Technorati, social bookmarks (del.icio.us, etc), etc. No registration is required nor do you have to install any tracking code.

The author K.Singh is a London based Internet and E-Commerce Consultant with over 10 years of experience in areas including Web Design , Internet Marketing, E-Commerce, Web development, Joomla and Search engine Optimisation.