There are a number of great tools out there that can help you determine “where” you’re sitting in terms of traffic, ranking, and how “good” your site is doing, generally speaking.

We call this research and analysis performancing, which is the art of making your website kick butt.

I’d probably use some of these services at least once a month to see how things are going. Do it for your blogs and your ministry websites.

Here are some of the sites I use consistently to keep track of how it’s all going down with my sites and others:

Quarkbase is a free tool to find complete information about a website. It is a mashup of over 30 data sources and many algorithms gathering information from Internet on various topics like social popularity, traffic, associated people, etc. It’s pretty nice.

A tool to check at-a-glance the link popularity of any site based on its ranking (Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Technorati etc.), social bookmarks (del.icio.us, etc), subscribers (Bloglines, etc).

Compare RSS Feed Subscribers with your “friends” … or competitors.

Website Grader is a free seo tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.

The script calculates the size of individual elements and sums up each type of web page component. Based on these page characteristics the script then offers advice on how to improve page load time.

Based on a data pool of over 9 million Internet users, Compete delivers tailored analyses and business recommendations focused on demand analysis, attraction and retention, and customer profitability.

Alexa is popularity based ranking tool which is achieved by users loading a search tool on their website. Alexa then tracks where you go and compiles the information into rankings based on the number of hits to each site.

This gives you an estimated value of your website or domain name by using the following factors : Links pointing to the domain ; Popularity of the domain ; Age of the domain ; Pagerank of the domain ; Traffic to the domain. It’s just an estimate, so don’t get too carried away with it.

BuiltWith is a website analysis tool, providing technical analysis and SEO optimization information to further your website’s marketing, sales and navigation effectiveness.

Any more that I missed?