This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Vincent Woo. Original Post: Search Engine Analytics and Webmaster Tools Feed Title: Undefined Range Feed URL: http://www.undefinedrange.com/categories/ruby-on-rails.rss Feed Description: Interesting things I experience with Ruby on Rails. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Vincent Woo Latest Posts From Undefined Range

The free website tool I use the most is Google Analytics because of its comprehensive stats. It provided answers for these recent questions I had:

• Where is traffic generating from (search engine or more word of mouth)?
• Which pages are popular and should influence the website's raison d'être? Conversely, which pages are under-performing and need a revised strategy?
• Are users upgrading their web browsers such that I can drop IE6 support and/or start using HTML5 features?
• Are there enough smartphone users visiting the site that warrants building a mobile website version?
• Where are people going to when they abandon shopping carts?
• After a major change such as a promotion, new site feature, or a link from a major website, how did users respond? Increase in traffic, stayed longer on the site, additional sales?
• How is the website doing compared to last year?

You might not have a pressing need to look at stats but it is a good idea to at least verify that search engines are correctly indexing your website. With these tools, setup is quick, simple, and non-intrusive. They'll even explain the errors spiders encountered when crawling your site so you can fix them promptly.

• Google Webmaster Tools
• Yahoo Site Explorer
• Bing Webmaster Center