As the SEO industry continues to grow more and more sites are popping up on the web with their version of a dashboard. Each of these dashboards offers something different, and they can also be useful when scanning a site for SEO. Here are a few sites that we like to use when we look at a site.

SEO Moz

Perhaps the most important SEO tool is SEO Moz. When scanning a site, we like to use SEO Moz’s Open Site Explorer, which will tell you how many links there are for a website, as well as how many domains those links are coming from. This is really important in determining where a site might rank on Google for two reasons.

First, the number of links can be a big factor in ranking one site ahead of another. This is why we constantly preach things like blogging, and proper social media use as this is a great way to increase the number of links. The other reason is something known as a link diversity ratio, or the number of total links divided by the number of linking root domains. This is a simple and effective way of comparing the number of links to the domains that those links are coming from.

Virante

Virante is unique in that it offers a “Duplicate Content” dashboard. Google often penalizes sites that contain multiple pages with similar content as a cheap way of increasing their page rank. This tool quickly scans your site, and lets you know if you have any pages with content that is too similar.

Majestic SEO

Majestic SEO is a great tool for a couple of reasons. First, it gives you great insight into the anchor text that is contained within your links. The site will break it down into a pie chart, and show you what anchor text is being used the most. Another reason is the link profile tool, which breaks links down by two metrics- citation flow, and trust flow. Citation flow is weighed by the number of citations to a URL or domain, while trust flow is weighed by the number of clicks from a seed set of trusted sites to a URL or domain.

Pingdom

Have you ever clicked a site but then hit the back button because the site took too long to load? This is where Pingdom comes in handy. Pingdom tells you the load speed for your site in seconds, so you can avoid this issue.

Raven SEO Tools

Raven might be the most comprehensive website out there. Loking for how many visits you get from your keywords, your social activity, or what sites are referring to your website the most? Raven has it all, and more. Raven also gives you the freedom to edit your dashboard. So, you can bring in the data that you find usefeul, and remove everything else. Last but not least, Raven allows you to run reports of your sites, which you can then download as a PDF file.

There are dozens of helpful SEO sites on the web. These are just a few of the many great SEO dashboards out there. Feel free to share some of the sites you use with us in the comment section.