At least initially, your website won't attract more than a few people here and there. Unless you have the bucks for a seriously good launch, you're going to have to build up traffic volumes over time. The best way to do this is by using a two pronged attack - content and links. While you're building up traffic it also pays to analyse it carefully because this can help you determine what is and isn't working and how people are utilizing your site. The results can be surprising...

Google analytics is a free analytics service that utlizes a small embedded tracking widget to collect information about any and all visitors. This information is easily accessible via an online interface which boasts a wide range of features such as graphs, maps, stats and so on. Signing up is easy but you will have to verify you own the domain in question by adding a meta tag to your home page or uploading a small file to the web server. There's plenty of help on the analytics site to get your though this process.

Once tracking is enabled it's important you check back at least once or twice a week to see how traffic flows into, around and out of your website. There's a lot you can tell about your visitors, including but not limited to:

So how does this help you, and why is it important? Think of analytics as a real-time flashlight on the otherwise opaque goings on of your website. Analytics really allows you to dig down the the fundamentals of how visitors are behaving so that you can react intelligently because the visitor data is represented and displayed in an intuitive and informative way - it's not simply lists of IP addresses. Google provide it for free because they know it can help their advertising customers pick and choose their ads more effectively, but this information is invaluable to you whether or not you choose to advertise.

Let's say, for example, that you write an article and put it up on your website along with a couple of other article websites. Analytics will be able to show you if people are reaching your site from one or other article site, or even if people are now finding your site via online search as a result of the new article content being indexed by the search engines. If you never get traffic from an article website, there is little point continuing to waste your time by submitting to it - find somewhere else.

You might also notice that people are coming to your website via searches on the wrong keywords. In which case you know to write content rich in more appropriate keywords. Remember, if people get to your site expecting one thing and they get another, it can lead to frustration and they are unlikely to return. In fact, analytics can help many people uncover website hacks precisely because visitors arrive using search terms and keywords that should not be present on the sites otherwise.

Knowing how people are using the site by observing how they navigate can also shed some interesting light on where to focus your energies or how to redesign the functional layout. You might expect people to go from the index page to your blog, but instead find that most try go to another page and then leave. Why are they doing this? Whatever the reason, at least you know that your site is not working as intended and there is likely room for improvement.

I could go on and on about all the different benefits and uses of knowing who uses your site, how they use it, and where they are from. The best thing to do is get started and jump in. You'll learn how to make use of this information in your own way and the sooner you start the sooner you can get a handle on what's really going on and start making intelligent decisions about how to proceed.