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.

Google PageRank is a scoring system for pages Google has indexed. It is essentially a measure of a page’s importance to Google. The highest possible PageRank is 10 and the lowest is 0. PageRanks are based on web pages. Each page of a site is assigned a PageRank. When people refer to a site’s PageRank are referring to the PageRank of the site’s home page.

How does Google assign PageRank?
The quick answer is inbound links. The more inbound links a web page has, the higher PageRank it is likely to have. In reality it is more complicated than that. Inbound links from pages with higher PageRanks weigh more heavily and the number outbound links from a page can decrease page rank.

How does my Google PageRank affect my site’s search engine ranking?
The algorithm that Google uses to determine their search result rankings is very complex and they don’t make it public. There seems to be a correlation between a page’s PageRank and its position in the search results for a particular keyword but there are a lot of other factors in play. You will frequently see pages with a low PageRank showing up higher in search results than a page with a high PageRank. However, generally speaking, if Google likes a page enough to give it a high PageRank, they will like it enough to rank it high in search results.

How do I find out my site’s PageRank?
There are a few useful tools for finding out and tracking your site’s page rank. They are:

Google Toolbar – The Google toolbar has a PageRank feature that gives you the rank of the page that is currently loaded in your browser. When you first load the Google Toolbar, you will be asked if you want to disable or enable the PageRank feature. Go here to get the Google Toolbar.

Live PageRank Firefox Plugin – The Live PageRank Firefox plugin is a good alternative to the Google Toolbar if you want to track your PageRank but you don’t want to the extra features of the Google Toolbar. It also gives you the PageRank of the page currently loaded in your browser but displays it discreetly in the bottom right corner of your brower. Go here to download the Live PageRank plugin.

PRChecker.com – PRChecker.com is a great resource if you want to get the PageRank of a website very quickly without downloading anything. Go here for their PageRank Checker tool. They also have buttons that you can put on your site that display your PageRank. Go here to get a PageRank button. I only recommend using one of these buttons if your home page has a PageRank that is worth bragging about, like a PageRank of 4 or better.