Websites are like a lot of other things. Anybody can simply toss one up on any given day, assign it a domain name, and have people coming to it like a water hole in Death Valley within a matter of days.

Of course, this is a serious challenge for most people because of things like SEO and linking. They’re not exact sciences, because of the proprietary nature of search engines and their tendency to switch up their algorithms.

Naturally, you need to know who is visiting your website. If you don’t, you probably won’t attract them back because you won’t know what they want. The easiest way to tell what your visitors want is to use survey software, which will let them tell you almost as well as if they were talking to you face-to-face.

You need to collect as much information as you can about your visitors. The trick is you need to be subtle about it. Sometimes you can break it down based on what you want to know about your visitors.

However, the key to remember is that what you say and how you say it revolves around who you’re talking to in the first place. After all, you should be using a whole different communications style for one gender, educational level and age group versus another of any of those variables. This isn’t even taking into account geographic differences. Do you think someone living in Florida thinks precisely the same way as someone living in Wyoming? If you think that, you might find that your website is only attracting scattershot, one-time visitors.