Your site is up, it's matured for a few months and now it's finally getting some visitors; congratulations. But just how much do you know about where these visitors are actually coming from and what exactly they're doing once they reach your site?

At this stage, most web developers and designers will tell you that your web server statistics are just what you need to be looking at since they provide you with an insight into visitor traffic, most common referrers and such.

The trouble is that a brief insight is really all your common or garden web stats server will actually provide, when what you really need is a complete overview of where your visitors are coming from and just what exactly they are doing once they reach your site.

Worse still; if you are running a pay per click campaign such as Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing, the data supplied by an ordinary web stats server has no way of distinguishing between 'natural' clicks and 'bought & paid for' traffic. The fact is that without a proper means to conduct in-depth keyword analysis, you are effectively flying blind where the promotion of your web site is concerned.

So what can you do? Where can you get the information you need to promote your site successfully?

Well, you could use one of the many 'free' traffic counters littered across the web. I won't go into these, since this article may well be read by children at some stage and the language I normally use when talking about free hit counters and traffic tools is definitely not for kiddie's ears.

If you really want to know what's going on, you need to be using one of the few decent keyword analysis tools out there.

The bad news is that these will invariably charge you an annual subscription fee. The good news is that with the information provided by these services*, you will be able to recoup your investment many times over.

*There is a certain amount of work involved in analysing and collating the data supplied by keyword analysis services, but this is well worth it when taking into consideration the increased revenues your site can produce in the wake of applying proper traffic research.

For further information, you may wish to check out the keyword analysis section of the IceGiant web site.

As far as the paid services online are concerned, I would consider the best amongst these to be:

Keyword-Analysis.com Keyword-Analysis.com features a nicely rounded pay per click analysis in addition to the comprehensive range of other features included in the service. WordTracker.com Word Tracker is a comprehensive tool used by many industry professionals working on third party promotion contracts. OneStat.com A very comprehensive service which may even be a little 'overkill' in places, OneStat comes with a hefty price tag compared to the other two, but does have a few extra bells & whistles. Are they worth the extra investment? Possibly not.

Of the three, Keyword-Analysis.com is my personal favourite due to the sheer depth of the information collected. There is a little work involved in putting it together the way you need it, but once this has been done, you will have all the information you could wish for to achieve your web promotion goals.