in Black and White | SEO Secrets & Insider Tricks

Statistics

Before I go any further, let me just make a quick point about statistics. This will be obvious to most, but I feel it is necessary to mention it in case there are some novice Webmasters who are unaware of it.

Not so long ago (oh, all right it was a few years back now!), it was commonplace to see a 'hit counter' on the home page of a site. What this little tool did was quite simply count the number of page loads – NOT the number of visitors. So the good old hit counter might have bolstered the ego of some newbie Webmasters but wasn't very effective for anything else.

In order to increase traffic to a site it is necessary to have to hand a reliable method of counting how many visitors the site is already getting and tracking where those visitors came from. Not having stats for your website is like driving blind - you don’t know if you even have any visitors to your site, or where they came from, or if they were repeat visitors, or what country they are in, or what platform and browser they were using, or what keywords they used to find your site, or from what link they came, etc.

A good stats package will tell you all of this information and more. Most importantly, analyzing your stats will tell you where you are going right and where you are going wrong and suggest improvements that need to be made in the future.

Useful Tools:

Statcounter, Found at: http://www.statcounter.com (A good example of a free and easy to install stats package. The free version is limited to the last 100 visitors.)

Google Analytics, Found at: http://www.google.com/analytics/ (Designed for use with the Adwords program, gives very comprehensive statistical information.)

AWStats, Found at: http://www.awstats.org/