I am always shocked when I meet with small business owners and they can’t tell me how much traffic their website receives.

Why am I surprised at this? Because tracking website visits is a fairly simple (and free) thing to do — and because, how can a business owner make any (good) business decisions without knowing what their customers are finding (or not finding) interesting on their website? Or how visitors are finding their website in the first place? Or in which city their website visitors are located?

They can’t. They can’t make good business decisions pertaining to their website or online presence without this information.

Google Analytics is one of many free SEO tools that is easy to set-up. All you need to do is create an account and place a snippet of code on your website. That’s it. So easy a caveperson could do it. (If said caveperson had an Internet connection.)

There’s so many features that Google Analytics provides, but at the very least business owners, (and the people who market the business) need to know which keyword phrases people are using to find their website, the referring sites that are sending traffic, and which pages people are visiting. Then, start thinking about what needs to be done differently, and how to implement a better social media marketing plan, pay per click advertising campaign, and SEO strategy.

Listing your website with the major search engines will help to ensure they are crawling your website. Click on each link below for a direct page where you can list your website URL.

• Google
• Yahoo
• Bing
• DMOZ

In addition, you will want to submit your website URL to each of the main search engine’s local business directories.

Google Places

Yahoo! Local

Bing Local Listing Center