When was the last time that you checked your site's web statistics? The web stats report can provide a lot of valuable information about the performance of your site, but I find that most people rarely look at them. Your web stats gives you an overview of how many visitors are coming to your site, what pages are the most popular, what websites are linked to you, and even what keywords people have typed into a search engine.

Most people know the rule; Any work that you create is automatically protected under copyright law as being yours. But should you bother to establish your work as copyrighted?

The latest tool to come out of Google Labs will allow you to customize your search results through voting. The way this will work is that, when you do a Google search, you can then designate which results were most useful (thus, raising them higher in your search results next time) or tell Google that certain results were completely wrong (and hide them forever). A link at the bottom of the search results page allows you to completely undo your votes. You would need to be logged into a Google account in order to use this.

You've probably heard how some people got rich by setting up a blog for a particular niche, built a large fanbase, and then made a ton of money off of the advertising. And now they blog from their laptop while sitting in their beach chair on their private island in the Bahamas (or something like that).

When you design a site, it's important to keep the navigation simple and easy to understand. Certain web design elements have become part of the collective consciousness; your users expect your site to act and behave in a certain, standard way. When your web design deviates from the norm, you force your users to think harder about how to move through your site. And the more difficult it is to navigate your site, the less likely it is that people will keep browsing your site; they'll just get frustrated at some point and leave.

Writing a blog is a very effective way of accomplishing two of your online marketing goals: increasing your search engine position and driving more traffic. Here's eight surefire tips that will help you create a blog that your users will value:

In our ongoing discussion of search engine optimization, keyword density impacts how valued your site is. What is keyword density? (Glad you asked.) Simply, keyword density is the number of times a particular keyword appears within in the total amount of text on the page. To get your keyword density, count all of the times a particular keyword is used. Now, count all of the words on your page, total. Divide total words into number of keywords, and that's your keyword density.

When it comes to planning your new web site, keep this in mind -- Size Matters. The more pages of keyword-rich content that your site has, the more important the search engines will believe your site to be. Just follow these simple rules:

• Content must be relevant to your site's topic
• Add new content on a regular basis
• Keyword density is important -- short pages of text with lots of keywords
• When possible, use your keywords in the page file names

Inc. Magazine has a great article posted called Turning Browser Into Buyers. One of the biggest nuggets of wisdom in the article: In addition to having a clear message about what you're promoting, you've got to have a Call to Action on your website. What is it that you want the visitor to do? Buy a product? Visit a meeting? Make a phone call?