If you build it they will come only applies in Hollywood. Building a website alone does not guarantee they will come. The fact is that website analysis is necessary to build a viable ecommerce site. Website analysis as to what promotional efforts are working and more specifically what keywords or keywords phrases drive the most visitors to your site.

Those are simple questions any webmaster worth his socks could answer without thinking twice and website owners who don't perform constant website analysis are doomed to failure. The best and most reliable way to figure out how traffic is getting to your website is to do some type of website analysis. And the website analysis should be done frequently because of the rapid changes on the Internet frontier. What worked last week or last month may be an ineffective strategy today.

For example, are you getting a ton of traffic from the search engines such as Google, Yahoo, & MSN? If so, figure out what search engine optimization tactics (SEO) you used on your site that drove the traffic and make sure to keep tabs on the latest SEO developments. Are you getting a lot of traffic through links on other sites? What sites and what are you doing that prompts people to click on your link? That would be good information to know as you could repeat it and place links on other sites to increase your traffic. A thorough website analysis will provide answers to these important questions.

With all the website analysis tools available today and as simple as it is to look at your statistics a few times each month, it's surprising how few site owners actually take the time to do it. Recent data suggests that less than one percent of site owners perform any type of website analysis at all. The sad part is that most web hosting service providers include website analysis tools in their hosting packages so the information is readily available if site owners would just take the time to learn how to access and interpret the data.

The statistics show that the majority of small business owners examine the website statistics for their sites less than one time every month. And even the few who do look at the statistics don't use this informative data to gauge the relative success of each marketing activity. So just by assessing the data regularly and using it to make informed decisions, you'll put yourself at the head of the pack.

Some of the more important metrics that can be measured through website analysis are:

1. Which pages on your site are visited most frequently?

2. Which pages are visited least frequently?

3. Which keyword and keyword phrases have attracted the most visitors?

4. Which links have drawn the most traffic?

5. Which search engines are delivering the most traffic?

This is very basic information that could and should be used to make strategic business decisions. Do yourself a favor and start conducting regular website analysis of your sites if you're not already. You'll be amazed at what you learn.