Some of the best ways to increase website traffic is to use tools that will help you analyze where your website traffic is coming from. What areas of your site are the visitors focusing on the most, and which articles and links do they find the most popular.

Here is a Great Post from Rich Page with Make Use Of.com

Apr. 5th, 2008 | by Rich Page |

First of all, thanks for all the kind words regarding my first web analytics post here last week! I started with the basics last time. This time I am going to be discussing all the free web analytics tools out there and yes, believe it or not, just because they are free, doesn’t mean they aren’t any good - you can get some great results using these.

I will walk you through the free basic tools that are essential to tracking your basic visitor stats, and then some more unusual, advanced tools that help you analyze your websites for free. So this post is really ideal for any wannabe web analysts out there who have a limited budget (i.e. zero).

The Free Basic Web Analytics Tools (Yep Free!)

1. Traffic Tracking Tool: Google Analytics

One of the best and most powerful free web analytics tools to track your website visitors is Google Analytics. Not only can you get all the basic metrics like pageviews and unique visitors, and trends for them over time, but you can set up goals so you can measure conversion rates (like for newsletter signups or products purchased). Another cool feature is the Site Overlay tool which enables you to see a visual breakdown of where visitors are going and clicking on your website. Its also very easy to put on your website - all you have to do is put a simple tag on each of your pages. No need for help from techy folks or your IT department.

2. Traffic Tracking Tool: Woopra

One of the newer free web analytics contenders (so new in fact that they are still in beta) is a tool called Woopra. This tracking tool is ideal for smaller websites, especially for blogs. Two of the cool features it has (that Google Analytics doesn’t offer) are real time visitor analysis (you can see where they came from, what page they are on, where they have been so far etc), and also a great built in chat tool, that allows you to popup messages to your visitors and actually talk to them - offer help, get feedback etc. Might be worth checking out, especially for those of you looking to try something different than the leading free Google Analytics tool.

3. Blog Feed Tracking Tool: Feedburner

For those of you that have a blog out there, you should be offering RSS (real simple syndication) feeds of your blog posts. This way, visitors don’t have to keep coming to your website to read your posts - they can read them via an online feed reader like Bloglines or Google Reader, or even read them in a daily email. This free tool, Feedburner, makes it easy to track who is subscribing to your posts via feed readers and email, and helps you learn what your most popular posts are. Go sign up!

You can read more of the story by Rich Page about: Web Traffic Analytic Tools

Tags: website traffic analytic tools, website traffic, increase website traffic