Everyone who owns a website wants to know if they, or their SEO provider, are doing the right job as far as optimising their website goes. You might get penalised by Google Penguin or Panda or whatever and need to work out what is harming your website. You may have an SEO provider that is giving you advice, or services, and you need to know if they are actually doing the work they claim to be doing.
As far as quality analysis work goes, these points will only get you so far. The best SEO is nuanced, and depends heavily on the niche and the products you are selling. Any consultant should be able to give you this information, it is the interpretation that counts.
Overall we recommend Google’s own Webmaster tools and Analytics to see if your site is progressing. The data is not always up to date, and it doesn’t give you a full picture, but it will tell you if your site is progressing up in the rankings, and if there is anything on your site you can do to improve your SEO value.
Keyword Choices
http://www.seoquake.com/ – This will tell you how competitive the keywords are that you are targeting. If you do a normal search for keywords that you think you should be aiming for, you will be able to see the “SEO Value” of the sites you are competing against.
http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/keyword-difficulty/ – SEO Moz have a huge number of tools that are worth using. Free users can use some of them for a limited time, but if you are just looking at your own site this should not pose a problem. The keyword difficulty measure should give you an idea if a particular keyword is worth pursuing.
http://www.semrush.com/ – This will give you an idea of how much people are paying for a particular keyword. If they keyword cost is over $3 per click, then you know that people are willing to pay quite a bit for the traffic, which can mean that the SEO will be expensive too.
https://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool – This is the basic tool everyone involved in online marketing should be familiar with. The main point within this context is that you can use it to see all the keyword that Google suggests are good for your website.
Using the tools above you can see what they keywords are you should be targeting, and what the competition is. Generally you should be targeting a few big keywords with high competition, and as many low competition keywords as you think apply. If you have an SEO consultant saying that you should be chasing the biggest, highest traffic keywords, then there is plenty you would be missing out on.
On Page Factors
http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization/new
http://www.webseoanalytics.com/members/seo-tools/web-seo-analysis.php
On page factors should be the easiest to fix, and should have the most dramatic effect on a website. The key areas here are that the front page and you main services pages are scoring high enough on key keyword factors. You can use the webseoanalytics tool to see if you are over-doing particular keyword phrases.
Site Structure
http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test
Use this tool to make sure that all your pages are crawlable. You also want to see that the pages all have unique titles, and meta tags, and that all the pages you think are important are able to be found by Google.
Backlink Checking
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
These tools are particularly useful as a result of Google Penguin and Panda. First you want to see that the links being built are from higher value areas, and second you want to see that the anchor text is not “spammy”.