Tracking who visits with website stat software is critical to building a great website.

You should consider your website a work-in-progress. Finding ways to tweak your content -- either to better connect with prospects (visitors) or to better optimize your site on search engines -- is best done with statistical software that can track who's visiting, when they visit, and where they found you.

Most website hosting providers have some sort of statistical software as part of your service.  If not, you can also consider putting an outside service on your web pages like SiteMeter (which does a free version of the service which is fairly good).

Here's what you can track with website stat software:

- How many unique visitors a day are visiting  your website.

- What pages these visitors are viewing

- How long these visitors are on your site

- Where these visitors were "referred" from.  Most software allows you to see where the visitor found you, such as a forum that you provided a link in, a directory that your site is listed in.   What's really valuable is to see what search engines visitors are finding you in -- and often you can see the specific search term they typed in to land on your site.

Once you have a way to track visitors, it is suggested you check at least once a week or once a month.  Knowing where your visitors are coming from, how they found you, and what keywords they are typing into search engines can give indication of what's working in your website marketing strategy.  It can also give you new ideas of how to get more traffic.