Key features include detailed reports about visitors to your Web sites as well as specific information on the keywords and search engines used to reach your location. You can also track data related to most popular pages. Installation time from download is about five minutes, according to developer instructions. The download provides a JavaScript tag that can be copied and pasted on Web sites you would like to track.

One of the nicest features about Piwik is that you can use it whether you speak English or not. In fact, the software is available in more than 30 languages already and the number is growing.

Interested individuals can try Piwik with an online demo. To install Piwik you only need to download the latest release, upload to your Web server and open your browser. *PHP 5.1 and a MySQL database are required. Installation will take about five minutes and should be automatic.

With Ad Intelligence you can work with lists of suggested keywords, and develop your strategy for keywords using MSN and Bing query information. The details include volume, relevance, demographic and geographic tracking as well as cost history. This data helps you fine tune your bid strategy because you use actual pricing information and data that is specific to keywords. You get information on clicks, impressions, cost-per-click and position.

One of the key factors in business success is leverage. Microsoft Advertising Intelligence allows you to leverage true history and forecast data. This means your keyword efforts are based on actual customer activity. You get key performance indicators (KPI) to track performance.

*You’ll need to uninstall the earlier versions of adCenter Add-in for Excel. Of course, you should have Microsoft Office Excel 2007 installed. Be sure Excel is closed when you go through the Ad Intelligence install process.

You can in addition find out how many links there are to your site and where they’re from, you can find out if there have been any crawl errors. You can learn all about your internal links and statistics for your subscribers. A section under the “Labs” menu helps you gauge your site performance and walks you through installation of the Page Speed add-on for Firefox that gathers all kinds of data on how fast your page loads and what, if anything, you can do to make it load faster. This tool is likely to get some miles on it now that site speed has been added into the mix of things that determines website ranking.

Seriously, if you have a free or slow afternoon at work one day, you should go through each of the Webmaster tools and find out stuff about your site you might never have known.

Having a sitemap is beneficial for a number of reasons besides the easier indexing of your site. A sitemap makes it easy for visitors to navigate the site, gets across the site’s general theme, and helps you, the webmaster stay on top of how your site is organized so that when you add new pages you can place them optimally within the sitemap, or else modify the sitemap to accommodate the new pages.

Some blog hosts, like Google’s Blogger, automatically create a sitemap for blogs started there. For other websites, there are a number of free online web tools that help you create a sitemap. One is http://tools.lilengine.com/sitemap-builder/, and another is http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp. If your website doesn’t have a sitemap, then you should make one and submit it to the major search engines. It will improve your site’s quality and rankings by helping bots and humans find their way around your site more easily.