If your intranet¹ is connected to the Internet, you can hook up Google Analytics and get quite a bit of information about how your intranet is being used.

Mark Twain said, "There are three kind of liars: liars, damn liars and statistics."

American Express just completed its semi-annual survey of small businesses with under 100 employees. The outlook is slightly upbeat with 55 percent having a more optimistic outlook toward near-term prospects compared to 45 percent in March 2009.

However, no one is popping any corks.

Under one quarter, 23 percent (vrs. 28 percent in last spring), have plans for hiring. This it the lowest reading in the history of the survey.

You think that it's a good idea to invest in cyperspace where your associates can communicate and share resources to accomplish great things for your company. Good. You are thinking ahead.

These days people transfer information in all kinds of. Not so long ago, for example, if you wanted to share a stale bread soup recipe with Mildred, you had to write it out and mail it to her. Today, you can send her an email with a link to Rachel Ray preparing it and a link to the recipe.

In organizational communications, nothing causes a more negative response than the word, “meeting.” Meetings never seem to happen at a convenient time, they usually go on longer than they're supposed to, and they often accomplish frustratingly little. Intranets can help.

What are your customers trying to tell you? Google Analytics can help you to find out. Conceiveably, this is the best kind of market research, because you get to analyze actions and not just the thoughtless answers on a questionaire.

Here are three ways your visitor is telling you about themselves just about as soon as you open Google Analytics.

High on the list of usability¹ issues it the ability to be able to read the site. One of the biggest impediments to easy reading is contrast between the letters on the page and background.

For example, here is a really classy looking site, Everson Museum of Art.

Promoting a website requires lots of tools to tell us what's going on.

Fortunately, most of these tools are free. Anyone just starting should not spend a dime on analytical software. Maybe with time your site will require a more sophisitcated approach, but you won't have to spend money on software to find out.

Here is a fabulous list of free keyword and link analysis tools.

Do you like traffic to your website? Start a blog.

Hubspot looked at about 1500 websites and determined that those with blogs had 55 percent more traffic and 97 percent more inbund links and 434 percent more indexed pages¹.