Google Analytics is the most elaborate and feature-laden of the bunch, and it’s all free, whereas for some of the other programs, you have to pay to upgrade to get premium features. But Onestatfree, Google Analytics, Piwik, and GoStats are all easy to use and set up. For most people, convenience and ease of use will be the factors that influence how much use you get out of any web analytics software. There will also be a certain amount of discipline you’ll have to get used to in order to make the most of your analytics. But once you learn to use the numbers to your advantage, you’ll be more motivated than ever to get your site in order and optimize it so you can reach all your goals for your website.

It’s also a good idea to find out if your server supports the HTTP header “if-then-modified.” With it, your server can tell Google if your content has changed since the last crawl of the site, saving you bandwidth.

If you use the robots.txt file, you can tell crawlers which directories can be crawled, and which can’t. Google Webmaster Tools has a robots.txt analysis page that can help you determine if you’re using robots.txt correctly. That way you can prevent crawling of things like search results pages or automatically generated pages that aren’t going to add any value for users finding you via search engine.

Another great test of how healthy your site is (at least as far as Google is concerned) is how fast pages load. You can use the Page Speed tool as directed here to check.