Use Your Tool

I have come across some really handy sites to check statitics, PR, and more. I thought I'd share a few with you.

Ping your site with Dosh Ping. It pings all the bigwigs so your site gets crawled faster.

Website grader checks your website out and tells you how fast, slow, whether or not you have too much html, as well as some other statistics.

You really should be using Google Analytics for several reasons. Analytics is Google's very own visitor tracking utility, allowing webmasters to keep tabs on traffic to their site, including visitor numbers, traffic sources, visitor behaviour & trends, times spent on the site and a host of other information gathered via two pieces of JavaScript embedded in the source-code. It can provide so much information that will help you improve your site overall.

Keywords are very important. Some of the better keyword research tools:
a. SEOmoz's Keyword Difficulty Tool - this tool from one of the great SEO innovators gives you a good general idea of how competitive your keyword/phrase is.
b. Trellian's Keyword Discovery Tool - user-friendly, simple, and feature-rich. One of the best keyword research tools available.
c. WordTracker Keywords - second to none, WordTracker has been a leader in keyword research for years. A great value.