If you already have a hosted website for your small or medium size business, most likely your hosting comes with some tools for tracking your visitor data. However there are free tools that can do a much better job of helping you to monitor or build your website traffic and optimise your web sites pages.

Google provides an absolutely free traffic analysis tool called Google Analytics that enables you to tailor your website building efforts to attract more traffic (visitors) and potentially boost your websites income. Though Google's results are mainly based on Google traffic, it is the biggest search engine and anything you do that helps you on Google, will also help you on other search engines.

In essence these tools help you to optimise your website, find out how visitors see your website, where they come from, and how to build your site to become easier to access.

In most cases while building your websites content, you probably try to guess what keywords or text potential visitors will type into search engines and try to include these keywords on your website in the hope that the search engines will lead them to your site.

Google Analytics helps take away the guess work by recording exactly what the visitors who were brought to your website typed into the search engines that sent them.

It also helps you find out what proportion of your website traffic is new or unique traffic as opposed to repeat traffic so you can tell if your site is becoming more attractive and useful to visitors.

These are some of the things you can find out with Google Analytics:

- Which are the most popular and highly visited pages on your website

- Which links visitors click on most and which pages they jump to on your site.

- From which websites people come to your site and where they go to when they leave.

- What proportion of your traffic is from search engines, referring sites, direct access etc.

- Which countries or cities your web site traffic comes from and how much comes from each country.

- What technology your visitors use to access the web e.g. operating system such as MS Windows, Internet access such as broadband, browsers etc.
- The bounce rate of your site and how long visitors stay on your website.

from these you can find out what your visitors are looking for on your website, which locations or countries you should be targeting, your visitors technology which could help you find out if it would be worth having video on your site etc. and from the bounce rate or time spent visiting whether or not your website and it's content is attractive to traffic.

So how do you use Google Analytics. You first of all need to register a free email account with Google. Next you register with Google analytics (just type those words into your browser while on Google, to find it). Next you input all the usual details e.g. your details, website address etc.

For it to work properly, you need to verify your account by putting a piece of tracking code on your website or loading a tiny text file into your web space. Don't worry. It's perfectly safe. This procedure is just to ensure that you the website owner are the one trying to find out all about your web sites visitors. (Contact us if you need help with this).

Once this is set up, all you need to do to track your website data and view your graphical reports is to sign into Google and click on the Analytics link.

You can easily add as many sites as you own to your account and view your website traffic trends graphically over periods of time. With this information at hand it will become much easier to tailor and optimise your website content to attract more visitors.