If you have a real estate website, there are a number of things you might want to track in order to make it the best it can be.

Analyze Your Site’s Traffic

One of the most important things to track is the traffic on the site.  Your web host should provide a way for you to do that.  Or, you can always use Google Analytics.  

The Google offering is free, and has fairly recently been updated.  You will need to add a bit of code to the header or footer of your website or blog in order for the Analytics to track your traffic.

Analyzing your traffic will tell you a lot about how people find your website, how long they stay, how often people return, and which pages are most popular and the type of monitor most of your users have, among other things. 

It gives you a great opportunity to fine-tune your content, design and navigation.  For example, if you’ve designed for a large-size monitor (high resolution), it will tell you how many of your visitors have to use the horizontal scroll bar to see your pages.  The vast majority of my visitors use a 1024×768 resolution screen, so I make sure there is no horizontal scroll needed at that size.

But Wait, There’s More!

After reviewing traffic, there are a number of things you might want to know about your website:

• Checking which search engines have indexed various pages on your website
• Checking on the incoming links (or backlinks) the search engines show for your site
• Checking where your site ranks in the search engines for the keywords you are targeting
• Checking what information a search engine can see on your website

And, there are all kinds of other types of information that may be helpful, or that you may just be curious about.

The best collection of tools I’ve seen all in one place reside at SEOmoz.   You’ll find a lot of free analysis tools on that site, although some are reserved for their Premium Members.  Don’t worry – you can create a free account at that site that will give you access to lots of information that you may not be able to easily get elsewhere.

Take some time to review the tools available at SEOmoz – you’ll undoubtedly find something you like.  And, if anyone knows how the site came to be called SEOmoz, please let me know!