It is a common fact that without website tracking you may never know what works well on your site, what is being read more than anything on your site and what keywords are delivering traffic to your web pages?

Tracking your websites traffic and other stats is the essential thing any webmaster must do to grow with their site and carry it's many following readers with you.

Until quite recently they were all paid traffic stat packages that would do the job, but now we have Google Analytics for the job and what this statistic based programme does is very detailed and precise in it's metrics and statistical tracking.

With Google Analytics you can track where in the world your visitors come from and with what web browser, they use, plus what keywords they typed in the search engines to arrive at your site, this is all valuable stuff for determining your next move content wise.

When you know something is popular on your site then you know full well that expanding on it more and writing in depth article content is the way to go and keep on going, do not stop, because if you stop writing and thinking up new ideas all you will have left to do in the day is keep checking your stats and that just wastes time if that's all what you plan to do each day.

On the flip side of this though the content that doesn't get that much attention through search you will know what to do to avoid getting low traffic or to avoid writing about that content related keyword again and try something else.

When you use the free options available to you, you have the choice of maybe using two tracker softwares to compare the results at first, comparisons are good on many levels, because no two trackers are the same or give the exact same metrics of everyone visits.

A lot of standard website stats packages will for instance count any view as an impression, while this is fine any impression could be from anything, a Google bot, other rss feed aggregators or some people could view multiple images on a page but that one view is only counted towards that pages total impressions for them visits.

I am liking Google Analytics more and more, sure there are some faults, but I won't go into them as they will most likely get ironed out in time, once more in depth stats get updated to the Analytics system.

The features that I like now at the moment are:

• Visitor count daily, weekly or monthly, I like to see this number for all the domain profiles I have linked to my Google Analytics account.
• Where my website visitors come from in the world, mostly they come from America, but I am slowly finding others around the world seeing some of my pages.
• The keywords people have used to find my sites or pages, this is especially useful later on when I can write more content around the most popular keyword phrases and expand on the long tail keywords.
• The bounce rate it one of them features that I hated at first(Because People were bouncing out of my sites!!), but once you realise that your site may not be for everyone, you can concentrate your websites to those who do like it.
• Unique visitors appear on most stats, but this one has return visitors as well which you can roughly determine how many come back to your sites.

 Once I find something that may become popular or is based on my stats, I will generally create more content surrounding that area of key worded content and really go out of my way to improve and make it better, a blog is excellent for this approach.

By providing value on top of already existing value will equal more value, so long as you remain on the quality level of the content that you have written previously.