When the web was young, website counters were the rage. You wanted to show visitors how many hundreds or thousands of hits your site received. The problem was, that's all the information you got. The number of visitors that clicked onto your homepage. You didn't even know how many were new hits or returning ones. Which pages are the most often visited and which never get any hits? Where is the traffic coming from?

Today, it's absolutely critical to have comprehensive, website statistics. If you are not able to host your own site, make sure to ask about website stats packages. If the ISP doesn't offer any or offers a basic one, consider a different provider. If you're lucky enough to be hosting the website on your own server, make sure you have the best stats program you can find/buy as it will give you incredibly valuable information.

You want to see which .html pages are getting the most traffic so you know where to expand and what to delete. You need to know which search engines are sending you the most hits and which key word(s) were used especially if you're considering keyword pay-per-clicks. How did my visitor stay? You also wanted the raw data of how many unique and return hits you got per day, week and month. Shoot for more information rather than not enough.

All this information is required to be able to effectively manage all forms of advertising. If you run television commercials directing people to your website, you'll see how effective it was by analyzing web traffic over those days. You can verify how many hits you get from paid advertising if your stats include a "referring site section".

Strive to utilize every possible avenue to gain more web visits. Free search engine listings are not only becoming more rare, but may only provide average web traffic. Pay-per-click and Keyword Sponsoring will help but search engines are not the only form of Internet advertising.

Link Exchanges are becoming increasingly more popular. We're not talking about the free, mass link exchange sites which are nothing but pages of links that usually aren't even listed alphabetical. We mean link exchanges with complimentary and supplementary businesses. Trade links with your manufacturers and vendors. These links/leads are even more targeted and better qualified.

Cable TV advertising has now become very affordable. The most expensive part is creating the commercial. Once you have that, monthly 'impressions' are dirt cheap compared to media like the Yellow Pages and the leading local newspaper. Also, make sure your commercial directs them to your website immediately. It's hard to track leads that come from a TV ad, but if you direct them to your website for a discount or special, you should at least see some spiking of traffic around the time your commercials play.

Give something away, add an industry newsletter, design a link section containing valuable, hard to find information. Do anything you can and be creative. Above everything else, make sure your website content is current, you continue to expand and grow your site and never stop being creative and searching for new ideas...