Here are a handful of useful tools that are not quite free. They are useful and have a place in every good SEO bag of tricks.
Eye-tracking studies show you where people are looking while they're on your web site. Dries Buytart, the founder of Drupal, showed one during his 2008 State of Drupal address at the Boston DrupalCon. The heat map shows where the users look in the first five seconds after landing on Drupal's main administration page. The red X's show where the users clicked, as shown in the following screenshot:
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With CrazyEgg, you can do something similar on your own web site. Although it can't track your visitors' eye movements, it can show a heat map that shows you where your visitors click. This is another one of those tools that you should install and let run for a few weeks or months so that you can collect some useful data.
The Crazy Egg tool costs $9 per month. To try it yourself, visit their website at www.CrazyEgg.com.
Mint is an extensible, self-hosted web site analytics program. Visits, referrers, popular pages, and searches can all be taken in at a glance on Mint's flexible dashboard. It's not as powerful as Google Analytics but it's very simple to use and hosted right on your own site, so it's fast and timely. The following screenshot shows how the Mint tool works:
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Mint costs $30 per site. To try it yourself, visit their website at www.haveamint.com.
