Finding out where you *are being* found is a much more effective plan. It tells you what's working, results come to you, and it tells you how people are thinking to find you. You're not guessing how you think they should be finding you. You're learning how your clients think and how they already found you.

Okay, so how do I find out how my visitors find me? I use a simplestatistics tracker on my sites. Your hosting company may provide stats for you check into it. They should include a section for referrers or top referrers. If so your all set. Find a way to access those stats. Check referrers section and they will tell you how you were found. If it was through a search engine, click on link and it should bring you to page you were found on, complete with keywords used, listed right there. You can check your progress every week and find out where you are popping up.

If your host does not have tracking software go to www.goldstats.com or some other FREE stats place and get yourself a statistics tracker on your site right away!

For me, marketing without referrer stats is like...

...trying to catch a fly in dark.

Having this understanding would change how business is done online. Every marketing investment, every page created and entire flow of a site could easily be tracked and understood.

Additionally, how you market to people would change significantly for both site owner and site visitor. If a person bought one product you could easily suggest other products that they would probably like. Amazon has virtually mastered this feature. This could also work for sites that don't sell online. If you knew a person enjoyed a certain article you could easily suggest to them that they read another article. You could track exact path people take through your site and compare that with your most wanted response. By understanding this information you could easily tweak your site until this response increased.

However, while technology is available to do this, most statistical analysis programs largely do not provide information in this format. The technology that enables this kind of detailed, valuable information is either custom made for a specific, deep-pocketed company or is just extremely expensive. The reason this has happened, in my opinion, is that average site owner has no idea this information is available. And if there is no apparent demand chances of seeing this kind of analysis tool in near future in not likely.