Tracking Website Traffic and Statistics

I, now, have a couple of websites I am working on to upgrade and drive traffic to:

Roots and Wings Education Services
Arborisan Woodcraft Inc.

These sites/businesses will be my first focus for marketing and sales. I have set up a spreadsheet for each website using Google Docs to track how my efforts are doing. The headings on the spreadsheets are:  date; monthly traffic to website; number of backlinks to website; Google page rank of website; Alexa rank of website; and a column each for the Google search engine rank for each of the top 10 keywords for the site.

I filled in one row for each website, yesterday, to establish my baseline, and I will use this spreadsheet to track changes in these stats once a month, on the first of the month, from now on. I can't remember who it was who suggested this as a first, rudimentary, tracking method, otherwise I would give credit where credit is due, so I apologize to the originator of this idea. In future, I will be more diligent about remembering to credit my sources.

The one difficulty I have with this spreadsheet, though, is that I haven't yet discovered a reliable, accurate method of determining how many back links a website has. If anyone knows of a good method, I would really appreciate if you would post a comment about it, not only for my sake, but for anyone reading this who might also be struggling with this.

In future posts, hopefully soon,  I will discuss my understanding of Google page rank, Alexa, how to use Google Analytics to determine what traffic is coming to your website, and why these are important things to track, for people who are brand new (even newer than I am) at internet marketing. When I say that I am a "new" internet marketer, what I mean is that I am new to actually doing Internet marketing. I have been learning about it for nearly a year, now, but I am just getting started in putting my learning into action which, of course, is one of the major keys to succeeding in anything, right? For anyone who is interested, I have been doing the bulk of my learning at Wealthy Affiliate University and Squidoo.