How can you optimize your site to work best for you and your visitors when you don’t keep track of where they are coming from, what they are looking for, where they are having trouble, and why they are on your site in the first place? I’ve become obsessed with keeping careful stats on any site that I care about. I want to know what people are searching for to find my site as well as what they are doing when they arrive.

One tool that is still very underused is Google Analytics. It’s free, it’s detailed, and it keeps Google informed of your traffic as well. Now you might be super private about who you want seeing your visitor stats, but, why worry about Google? Each visit to your site calls a script from Google and stores data about that individual’s visit. If anything you should add this to your site just so Google is aware that your site is getting traffic. After all, the more traffic you get, the more search engine spiders Google will send. Why not help them out by giving them a heads up?


Analytics used to be Urchin before it was purchased by Google a few years ago. It also used to be available only to a select few while it was in BETA. As of late 2006 Analytics was opened for everybody, as well as allowing users to add an unlimited number of websites to be tracked per account (The original limit was 5, then 10). If you are not using Analytics yet, I highly suggest you try it out. You can track a huge amount of data about your traffic trends, as well as your search result trends. It is by far better than any other web stats scripts or services that I have ever used. I’ve recently been recommended to a few heatmap visitor click tracking and mouse tracking scripts that I might be checking out in the near future. Also, Google has just recently announced that they will be unveiling a new version of Analytics over the next few weeks. That’s another reason why now is as good as a time as ever to start using it! When it comes to optimizing your website, you can never go too far.