One way to use your time wisely is to keep an eye out on where visitors to your site are coming from. Knowing where your hits are coming from lets you channel your marketing resources to the most cost-effective advertising channels.

When you start out a new site, you’d probably want to try out a lot of different ways to market your site, including web directory submission, article writing, pay-per-click, social bookmarking, etc. Monitoring your website stats lets you know which of these methods is most effective and allows to focus your time and money those methods.

You can view your stats by logging into your hosting account. I like Awstats because it produces really neat charts and tables. If your hosting provider does not provide statistics for your site, you may use a third party service like Sitemeter.

Screenshot from cpanel:

One way to check to see if Google PageRanks are being updated is to check the PR of your site across the various Google datacenters. This is possible because the datacenters are out-of-sync with one another, and during an update, they may not show the same value.

Finally, Google appears to be updating its toolbar pageranks. If you go to the following tool and check any domain name with a PR of greater than 0, you’ll find that some datacenters report a PR 0 for that site.

http://livepr.raketforskning.com/

In the past the updating datacenters give you a glimpse of your future PR, but this time they show PR 0 for any domain you enter. So, there is no need to panic.