The first lesson of traffic analysis is that you can never have enough data! You just need time to go through the different options and services. Using those data sources, you will come to know whether your Search Engine Optimization efforts have paid off.

If you follow the things explained in this book, you should see an increase in traffic coming from search engines as well as referring sites. You can also check if your site layout and visitor expectations match your web site building ideas. If they are better fitted together, you should see a lower bounce rate and a larger number of page views per visit. The time spent by the visitor on your site would then increase.

The nice thing about analytics tools such as StatCounter and Google Analytics is the fact that they store a large amount of data for you. They also operate on fast, special servers for data collection and, as their code should be somewhere towards the end of the HTML code of your site, there should be little to no impact on the site's performance.

As you start working further towards optimizing your web site, you can see which actions have a positive impact and which don't work for your web site.

Keeping tabs on your site with your statistics and analytics tools working on them, is an ongoing effort that you need to do at least once a month. That will give you a better understanding of the tools, a better insight into your web site and its visitors, and give you the joy of seeing your hard work pay off.