Google offers a ton of cool products. Interestingly, they also offer some good tools for site owners -
- Google Webmaster Central - Google Webmaster Central provides a variety of valuable information including popular searches, inlinks, what GoogleBot finds as text for links to your site. In addition Google Webmaster Central lets you change the crawl speed, target a website to a specific region and some other options.
- Google Analytics - Google bought Urchin which was an excellent web analytics company and made the product free (a really good move). By adding the Google Analytics javascript to your page’s code you can get really valuable and really comprehensive data on users to your site and their behaviour on your site.
I strongly recommend Google Webmaster Central. As far as Google Analytics it depends on how comfortable you are with leaving information in Google’s hands. Some good alternatives to Google Analytics are Mint, GoStats, Statcounter, etc. Also, if you’re using wordpress there are a variety of plugins including Wordpress’s own stats plugin.