The Organic Book of Search Engine Optimization
The Organic Book of Search Engine Optimization
You should at the very least install a good statistical analysis program on your web server to find out what kind of traffic you are getting, where it's coming from, and which pages people are accessing.
You should at the very least install a good statistical analysis program on your web server to find out what kind of traffic you are getting, where it's coming from, and which pages people are accessing.
AWStats (http://awstats.sf.net) is a great open source web server log analysis reporting tool. The stats give you data based on traffic, pages accessed, times, which search engines they came from, search phrases used, and even operating system and browser. See a working demo (http://awstats.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/awstats.pl) of AWStats.
Google has many secret functions, commonly referred to as "googlisms" that will allow you to extract certain information about a web site from their database. The following are just a few examples of what you can find out.
You can find out how many of your pages have been indexed by Google by typing in a few hidden commands into the search field.
For example, by typing site: and inurl: you can check a site, like this: "site:organicseo.org inurl:organicseo.org (http://tinyurl.com/dgare)" in Google, you will see all the pages that this site has in their database (at the time of this writing, 821 pages).
You can also find out how many backlinks you have, by using the link: operator in the main Google search field. For example, "link:www.organicseo.org (http://tinyurl.com/7safk)" shows that there are currently 390 backlinks in the Google database pointing to this site.
Setup a Google Analytics account (http://www.google.com/analytics/) to track your web traffic. It allows you to create accounts (usually a web property), and then setup profiles within that account -- this can be a subset of pages, a sub domain, or product pages, etc.
All it requires is a bit of javascript code that you cut and paste into the footer of your web site, the rest is handled by Google and you can login to Analytics and get a nice view of all the data it collected.