It is sometimes forgotten that up until 2004 Yahoo was the tool used to find information on the Internet, and that Yahoo was then a directory.

Today the number one tool for finding information on the Internet is the search engine,and in particular it is Google.

See Web Directories Explained-What are They and are They Important?

When people think of Optimizing Web Pages they think of optimizing them for a particular Keyword Phrase (s). However when done correctly a web page can get found for many phrases that you didn’t  specifically target.

Continued in Uncovering the long tail of search.

Many small business sites that I come across are missing one of the most important site elements! The ability to track their traffic.

How do you know if your optimisation or PPC efforts have been worthwile unless you have the ability to trakc your site traffic.

Many website packages include access to the web logs and limited traffic stats but they aren’t nearly as useful or easy to use and understand as the free tools provided by Google.

There are two Google tools/services that you should be using they are:

Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools.

For a background take a look at Website Monitoring And Maintenance .