One of the most enjoyable parts of internet marketing is checking your statistics, I try to limit how often I do it so that I don’t waste time on it yet we all know the joy of checking your ClickBank account and seeing some cash tacked onto your monthly check. When I am creating a static website that has stand-alone content that is not often updated I love checking the number of links leading into it.
Often on forums I hear people asking where to get a good backlink checker, search engine results placement checker, etc. I am a big fan of new tools, so if you know of a great tool feel free to post it in the comments and I might stick it into this post. Here’s the list of tools that I typically use once a week for my websites:
Yahoo Site Explorer – A tool that displays all of the backlinks to your website that are in Yahoo’s index, as the second largest search engine this results in a very good overall picture of your backlinks. Google’s “link:” command is basically worthless but Yahoo is willing to divulge the extent of their link discoveries.
Search Engine Genie Google Position Checker – One of my absolute favorites, this is a tool that you can use unlimited times (free!) for checking where your website ranks in Google for a given search term 1000 rankings deep. I use it all the time, so they deserve a free link, I highly recommend it.
SmartPageRank Backlink Checker Tool – This is another great tool, it checks the number of backlinks to your site and then gives you the option to also get the PR of those pages, anchor text, and presence of “nofollow” tags on the links.
Google Blog Search – A great tool for bloggers as it shows the links incoming to your site from other blogs. Not everything that links to you will generate a ping, so this is a great way for bloggers to check how they fare in the blogosphere.
For traffic checking I typically use Google Analytics and MyBlogLog, I prefer the layout of MyBlogLog to G.A. so I typically check that more often than analytics.
Remember not to get too caught up in statistics, many people will literally spend hours checking how much money they are making, traffic they are gaining, etc. A watched pot never boils, and the time you spend checking stats will take away from the time you spend building links and traffic.
If you have any other great tools, feel free to post them. If not, subscribe to my RSS feed 
James – I’ve been reading your posts. I like it. Plus, this is a great list of free tools. I’ve been looking for a Google rank checker. Previously, I used one of Jim Byrkin (spelling?)’s free tools but its gone.
I’ll give your blog a mention on my intermediate seo blog…