Beth Kanter recently blogged about measuring the value of your blog. She notes that a single metric doesn't exist that will tell you if your blog is a success or not, and lists six metrics for benchmarking performance. She also lamented that, depending on your blogging tool of choice, calculating some or all of these metrics maybe difficult or time-consuming. I'd like to suggest four tools that help you assess website effectiveness quickly.

At a basic level, I think overall site traffic, such as visitors or page views, can be a good metric to keep an eye on to evaluate your site's effectiveness. As long as traffic is growing, you know you must be doing something right. You have to be careful with the metrics, as they can be very easy to game and manipulate. The tools I look at below will help you see if you are writing content that is valuable to your audience and aligned to your site's purpose, and to make sure potential readers can find your site.

AideRSS

I discovered AideRSS through Beth's blog as well, and its very handy for identifying valuable content. If you have a syndication feed available on your site, it can analyze the entries and produce ranked listings that detail, per entry, how many people saved it to delicious, suggested it on digg, or left a comment. At the top o fthe report, it breaks down posts between good/great/best, and also the top 20. Ideally, you'd like to have more posts in the great and best categories, these are pieces of content that your audience wants to read. You can also get some insight into what kind of articles and posts your audience finds valuable, since you can see which posts are being saved, recommended, and discussed. AideRSS can help you write good content that people want to read. Although it seems to accept any site that provides a syndication feed, it seems to be geared towards analyzing blog feeds. Finally, its limited to items that appear in your syndication feed, so you'll want to check your feed in AideRSS regularly.

SEOmoz Trifecta

SEOmoz's trifecta tool, analyses a site with data from various web services and rolls them up into a score from 0 to 100. While it claims to measure your blog's "importance and popularity", its really usefuly for seeing how well your site will rank in search pages. Better search engine rankings move you to the top of search page results, and that it turn leads to more traffic from search engines. The final score is useful for checking trends over time, but the real value of this tool is in the variety of services it polls for data, including Yahoo Site Explorer Links, Alexa Rank, Technorati Rank, Google Blogsearch Links, among others. It also allows you to compare your score to general website categories, and also provides generic tips for improving your score. Its not a prescriptive tool, but it can be used to measure the effects of site tweaks, link exchanges, and other marketing efforts. While its free, users must register and are limited to one report per day.

Website Grader

Website Grader by HubSpot is very similar to SEOMoz trifecta. Both are good tools, but Website Grader gives more prescriptive advice on improving your site. For example, if you are missing a Description meta tag, it will notice and recommend that you have one. It also reports on search engine optimization metrics including Google PageRank, number of pages in Google's index, number of inbound links. Like Trifecta, this tool is more useful fo rmeasuring the effects of improvement efforts.

Google Webmaster Tools

If your site is like most others, the majority of traffic comes from Google. It's important to keep tabs on how well and how frequently your site is crawled by Google. Luckily, they provide a tool for webmasters. Once you've verified ownership of a site, you'll have access to a ton of data about how google sees it. The first page tells you when Googlebot last crawled your home page, you'll want this to be realtively recently, and verifies that your site is included in Google's index. From there, you can see if their are any technical problems preventing google from accessing content. Such problems may include HTTP errors, broken links on your site, and unreachable URLs. If any number is very large, relative to the number of pages on your blog, you should investigate and try to correct it. The Content Analysis reports can tell you if you need to pay attention to meta descriptions, missing/duplicate title tags, and other elements which can negatively affect search engine positioning. I've found the webmaster tools most useful for discovering what external sites link to a site, particularly for interior pages.