One of the must-haves of any website and the foundation of any good SEO strategy is reliable visitor tracking software. You need to see how much traffic your site is getting, where your traffic is coming from, and what your visitors are doing once they get to your site. Without tracking software, you won’t know if any of your SEO tricks are improving your position in any of the big three search engines – Google, Yahoo. and MSN.

Here are a few visitor tracking software apps that are free or very affordable:

Google Analytics. Like all of Google’s other software apps, this one is top notch and free. A couple features worth mentioning are geo targeting and the Adwords integration. Geo targeting lets you see where in the world your traffic is coming from. Your hits are plotted on a map of the world and you can zoom in to view the number of hits in each city. Google Adwords integration is very useful if you advertise on Google. It lets you track user actions starting the moment someone clicks on your ads.

StatCounter. A good alternative to Google Analytics. One feature that I really like is its ability to track the actions and get IP addresses and location information for specific users. However, with their free version they offer unlimited summary data, but they only let you see expanded data from the last 500 page loads. To see more than that, you have to pay a monthly fee. Their paid plans range from $9 a month to see expanded data from the last 2,000 page loads to $49 a month to see expanded data for the last 100,000 page loads.

WordPress Analytics. A useful plugin for a WordPress blog. It provides the basics but its features are somewhat limited compared to other user tracking tools available (ex: you can’t filter out IP addresses you don’t want tracked, like your own). The upside is that your stats are displayed directly in your admin control panel so you can check your stats as you are managing your blog post. If you use WordPress Analytics, I recommend also using one of the other tools mentioned here.

FireStats. An open source tool that allows you to manage your user tracking tool on your own server without having to logon to someone else’s site. FireStats is not as feature-rich as Google Analytics or StatCounter but it has all the essentials and is easy to use. FireStats is free for non-commercial use and $25 per license for commercial use.