Another interesting source of information about traffic on your site is in the "Referrals" area of Smarter Stats.

Again, you'll find this in the left navigation bar in Smarter Stats:

And here you'll find information about how visitors are finding you - search engine results, other Web sites, direct bookmarks.

In the clip below, I've selected "Referring Sites" for the ANR Catalog site:

The default time period is for the past 7 days, but you can use the calendar to select any time period you like.

Each of these listings is a live link. The link takes you to the home page of the referring site, not the actual referring link - that's a different report.

For example, the Dave Wilson Nursery site has made 33 referrals in the past week to the ANR Catalog. Just knowing the referring site can be helpful enough - you don't always have to track down the referring page. But if I want to know the exact link I have to do a little detective work. A few minutes of clicking reveals. . .

a very nice reference to The Home Orchard.

But you can also look at "Referring Links" which gives you more (sometimes too much) detail.

From this report, I can see that most of my referring links are internal links from ANR Web sites. But the direct link from the Dave Wilson site is also there, at number 28.

So how do you use this information?

First, it's a good idea to have a handle on referring sites. It can reveal some pleasant surprises (as in the above example). It can also give you an idea of how well you're doing in search engine returns.

In this example, I see that a bookmark or direct entry is still my number one referral. For several weeks after we made the changes to the online catalog, Google was the number one referrer. Now Google has dropped to #2. This tells me that if I want to increase search engine traffic, I need to make some changes to ANR Catalog. If the search engine crawlers find static copy at your Web site, it can drop in the rankings.

Second, this is a good place to take some baseline statistics before making changes to your website. After the changes are implemented, you can see if changes to your content or title tags have had any effect.