You've had your website for awhile, but do you know if it's being used? What do you know about your site visitors? It's known by a lot of different terms, hits, statistics, analytics, traffic analysis, visitors, but what is it really? For now we'll call it "website traffic", to define those people zooming along the Internet highway who stop by to visit your website. Let's learn a little more about these people, who they are and who we want them to be.

You know your business, you know your customers, if pressed you could probably even identify your primary target audience: perhaps it's middle-aged women on a spiritual quest; perhaps it's people headed to the beach during the summer; perhaps it's families looking for a quality education locally. While typical websites don't track gender or age, there is a lot you can learn about your visitors looking at your website traffic.

Every time a person views a page on your site, "hits" are logged to a webserver. If you know what you're looking at (or have the right tools) you can analyze these hits. You can learn things such as where your customers are, what they're looking at, what they're looking for, how long they spent on your site, even which ones used a mobile phone to view your site. Don't worry, it's not an invasion of privacy; although this information is being recorded about your surfing habits every time you visit a website, your identity is not associated with it. By looking at the volume of visits, you can learn a lot about your customers by the trends you see in your traffic logs.

Coming up next: a good (and free!) tool to use for measuring your website traffic.