Here's an analogy for you. Yesterday, I was working my butt off in the gym on the cardio machines, panting wildly with sweat dripping off me and my face as red as a beet. Not the most attractive sight, but I figure, you're at the gym to work out right? I might as well "go hard" or "go home", as they say.

As I looked around me, I could see all these people simply going through the motions. There they were, minus perspiration in their shiny new lycra and expensive gym shoes, casually walking on the treadmill or lazily turning the wheels on a bike while reading a book or glued to the TV screens in front of them. Only a few seemed to be there for the actual purpose of working out. The rest seemed to be there to check out the talent or to simply keep up the appearance of fitness, while doing the bare minimum.

Huh? I don't get it. Why have these gym bimbos paid so much money for a gym membership and all the related gear if they aren't going to take full advantage of their investment?

Then it struck me - these gymbos were just like those companies who spend thousands of dollars on a shiny new website with all the bells and whistles like graphic design, blogs, shopping carts, web analytics, the lot and then fail to take advantage of it. I see it so often, regardless of company size. Web sites that could easily be bringing in loads of traffic and revenue simply wasting away because nobody can be bothered tracking visitor activity, analyzing trends or checking for search engine compatibility and usability.

These companies are simply keeping up appearances, investing heavily in Internet technology because their competitors are doing the same. But no thought has gone into the search engine compatibility of the site, how usable it is for visitors or whether it meets accessibility guidelines. They don't look at their site statistics, they don't check for broken links and they sure as heck don't investigate why their sites aren't converting traffic into customers. What a waste!

Is your web site working hard enough for you? Run it through the following 20 point fitness assessment to find out:

- Is your site fully search engine compatible? Are all your pages being indexed by the major search engines?

- Do you track your visitor statistics on a regular basis? Do you use the information provided by your visitor statistics to improve your site?

- Is your web site accessible to visually-impaired visitors? Does it meet the international standards set down by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)?

- Do you know which sites and search engines provide you with the most traffic? Do you use this information to increase your traffic further?

- Do you track the source of all reported errors in your site statistics and fix them promptly?

- Do you know which keywords your site was found for in the search engines? Have you conducted keyword research to determine what search terms your target markets are looking for so you can optimize for them?

- Does your web site HTML code validate to W3 standards? Do you check for validation regularly?

- Does your site contain zero broken links? Do you check for and fix broken links regularly?

- Has your site been fully search engine optimized to integrate your target search terms into your Page Titles, META Tags and visible page text?

- Have you created and submitted an XML sitemap to Google Sitemaps?

- Have you created and submitted a sitemap to Yahoo Site Explorer?

- Have you checked to see if your site meets Google's Webmaster Guidelines?

- Do you measure your visitor sign-ups and conversions on a regular basis? Do you tweak your landing page copy to increase the conversion rates?

- Is your site navigation intuitive and are your visitors following the navigation paths you intended?

- Do you encourage feedback from your site visitors and provide an obvious way for them to provide such feedback?

- Are there at least 250 words of text on your home page to satisfy search engines?

- Does your site contain a visible, text-based site map to aid user navigation?

- Do you have an ongoing link building campaign running to secure more incoming links to your site and improve your site's link popularity score?

- Does your site have a high percentage of repeat visitors? Are the majority of your visitors staying on your site for more than a minute?

- Do your search engine referrals and site traffic figures grow each month?

Unless you can answer yes to all the questions in the above checklist, your web site is not working hard enough for you and needs a workout. Get to it!

I've done quite a bit of research into web analytics lately, and I have found a couple of things. Google analytics Is a great tool, but it cannot be the only tool an organization relies on. Because it is a purely JavaScript based, it is unable to catch browsers that do not have JavaScript enabled, this includes the search engine robots, some hand held devices, as well as a percent of users that manually turn this off. That being said we need a tool to parse the log files from the server and to give us information about these users, as well as providing us with "on demand" stats where as Google's stats are next day. The server logs also contain a wealth of other information that we are collecting automatically, so we might as well take advantage of it.

I have come to the conclusion that we need to use Google Analytics but we also need a tool that reads the server logs. There are quite a variety of tools that would fill this need. Google recently purchased Urchin who's web analysis product runs Google analytics, costs about $3k and will work with the Google Mini, Urchin also gives the ability to read logs from server software other than IIS (like apache, the software used for open source applications) .

Urchin will be releasing another version shortly, and this will be the first release since the Google buyout. Another option is WebTrends Analytics it costs about $4k. It Like Urchin will read both IIS and Apache logs, and has a web interface for users. The last product is NetTracker, it runs about $4k for the software, and another grand for support. it was recently bought out by Unica. The administration of netTracker is not the smoothest, and the support seems to have declined on quality since the buy out.

So you're considering building a website and you may be feeling a little overwhelmed by it all. While this can easily happen it is wise to whip out some note paper and write down exactly what you want to achieve and what steps you need to take in order to get there.

So the first thing you are going to need to do is put the foundation in place. This will require extensive research. Now contrary to popular opinion I start this process a little bit differently than what is generally advised.

Now while we all know that you need to find a hungry market doing this can be a little more difficult than explained in actual fact that is just like everything else when it comes to doing anything online.

Actuality can be quite different from theory. So what I do is visit the article directories. I punch in a keyword that I am interested in and see what articles come up relative to that. Then I check the articles out to see how many page views they have received over a given period of time.

If an article receives a lot of page views then I know that there are a number of people looking for information relative to this subject. I also know that if I write an article on this topic that it will receive a lot of page views and as a result get a lot of click throughs to my site which will help me get traffic quickly without having to worry about what Google and everyone else does.

Next I visit the forums to see what solutions are being discussed then I go back to the articles and check what the writers are promoting and see if it is a valid good product to help people achieve the goals they desire. If so then I make note of it. Now I feel a little more confident about building a site around this theme.

The next thing you have to consider is the domain. A keyword in the domain is helpful but not essential. Your next quest is hosting. You need a good host as this is your life line.

Finally you want to be able to build the site effectively so as to achieve good search engine rankings. Keyword research relative to your overall theme will help you to do this plus you need to structure the pages properly so that you site can be understood by the search engines.

Do not worry if you lack technical knowledge as there are site builders out there to help you overcome this challenge.

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