For all small to medium sites with a tight Google Analytics is a great option and is the greteast price of all, free.  Google Analytics is simple to to install.  All you need to do is add a simple snippet of javascript code to your pages and you are up and running.  Some content management systems such as WordPress make it even easier offers a Google Analytics for WordPress plugin that makes it even to get your analytics solution up and running.  When you are up and running the next thing to figure out is what metrics are useful for your site because Google offers a ton.  To that, my advice would be “it depends”.

There are many different types of sites out on the web such as blogs and e-commerce.  If you have a site where you sell things then you will care a lot about ROI, revenue, and conversions.  If you have a blog, you want to track total unique visitors, new visitors, and repeat visitors with a focus of about a 50-50 ratio of unique to new visitors.  You want people returning, plus you want that new traffic.  For all types of sites the duration, visitor loyalty, and visitor recency metrics help to provide great insights into the behavior of your traffic.

Are people staying a sufficient amount of time to do what they came for and not bouncing?  Duration helps to determine if people are engaged on your site, but not lost.  Visitor loyalty helps to show how many people are returning and how much they are returning.  If you have a high percent of visitors accessing multiple times, it is a good possibility your site is engaging and people are coming back for more.  If people are visiting just once, it is a good sign the content is not engaging. Visitor recency is similar to loyalty, but helps give insights into the duration of time it takes for people to return to your site.  This can help to determine how often you should manage your content or how often to add you should be providing new content.

For the larger corporations with bigger budgets there are multiple products on the market.  The key is to find the solution that best fits your needs.  Adobe’s Site Catalyst provides a great dashboard reporting interface similar to Google and Adobe’s Insight provides an ability to do more of you on the fly deep dive reporting along with a less robust executive dashboard.  Other popular solutions are Web Trends and Woopra.

No matter how small or large your website is if you want to be successful you need to do analytics.  Analytics provides you information and insights you need to get people to your site and to keep those people coming back for more.  Google Analytics is a great to start and get your feet wet.  Then if you decide you have outgrown or need more, it may be time to look into other solutions that may provide you with just what you need to keep your site engaging.

First thing I do is get the site verified with Google’s Webmaster Tools and submit a sitemap. Looking at other people’s experiences it may take a while and I am finding that out with my first blog site taking nearly one month to get indexed. My next step will be to participate in related communities and get the blog linked with credible sites. After the Googlebot gets the sites indexed, I plan to employ the techniques detailed in the Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide to see if I can get my blog sites more visible.

All this makes me wonder if a blog, such as Blogspot sites just are not as important to the Googlebot. So, my plan is buy a cheap domain name to see if the Googlebot initial index time is cut down. A domain also allows me to maintain, control, and monitor my own domain that is not part of other sites. That way I can start to learn more about the infrastructure type things to keep a website up and running on my own.

All you have to do is enter the address, phone number, and category of you business.  Then, select from a several options to let a customer get a quick glimpse of your business from a search results.  Things like payment options, hours of business, photos, videos, and other specifically stated information.  I feel business hours alone should be boost because I find myself frequently looking for hours of a business only to dig around on their website and ending up calling, which is a very frustrating process.

Google Local Business Center is a no-brainer if you want to get more search exposure for your business on Google.  And, Google even provides a short video succinctly detailing how the service works and how easy it is to get setup.

From all I have read from the pundits and bloggers Adobe is acquiring Omniture to be able to provide a one-stop shop to build, maintain, and monitor your website. Site Catalyst is great for providing that metrics dashboard which companies require, but the question is “what will Adobe do with Insight?”

If Insight is raking in money then one can assume it won’t get touched. The next question is whether Adobe will even spend any money or effort upgrading the product. It will have to get re-branded with Adobe’s stamp, but how far will they go?

Some other speculation milling about is that Adobe could sell the Insight piece to one a company such as Oracle or Microsoft because those companies have been hot for the Visual Sciences piece for a bit now. This may be their opportunity to make Adobe an offer they cannot refuse for this piece. Insight’s strengths do not lie in its automated reporting and dashboard display capabilities. It seems as though Adobe would be more interested in the Site Catalyst piece. But, then again cash is king and if Insight is raking in the dough, then I am sure Adobe will keep that piece.

No matter how all this turns out, it should be an interesting few months as things shake out.

In this quest for getting a deeper understanding for the web, I ran across a series of podcasts called Managing the Edge with hosts Doug Mitchell of createWOWmedia and Andy Brudtkuhl of 48web. These guyes produce a new podcast on a weekly basis and now have 24 podcasts available to download (as of typing this post) where they have in-depth discussions of aspects of running a successful website such as optimization, pay per click advertsing, and using Twitter for business.

I have been listening for about six months and have listened to most of the podcasts now. All of podcasts have been informative, but in my opinion the podcast really started to get good around the 19th episode discussing Local Search Optimization.  In this episode Andy and Doug go in-depth about how to make your business visible in the most relevant searches within Google along with Google’s Local Business Center.  I have read books and read blog posts regarding this same thing and they are not as simplified and in-depth as this podcast.  Very impressive.

This is just one example, but the podcast is getting progressively getting better and now they are bringing in guest experts to enhance the podcast and infuse knowledge and expertise of the topic.  The most recent podcast (The Best PayPerClick and AdWords Podcast You’ll Ever Listen To) is a great example of how they have evolved and a must listen if you are interested in learning about PPC campaigns and Google AdWords.  I have listened multiple times now just to make sure I get all the nuggets from that podcast.

I realize this is not the only source of information on running websites, but I feel it is the best I have run across.  Check it out when you have a chance, I am sure there is something that you do not already have a firm grasp on.