To start with, avoid using a “hit counter”. Counters are misleading and don’t effectively provide enough data about your website. They can also be very dangerous if you try a “free’ one. I have seen dozens of sites infested with trojans due to free hit counters. Just forget them.

A lot of web-hosting services offer Webalizer. There may be different “server-side” statistic programs like AWStats installed as well. It is up to you what to use, or you may even have multiple tracking systems simultaneously, if your host allows. (Statistics software causes a lot of work for the server, and many hosts do not allow more than one at a time.)

Figuring out Webalizer. (This is a partial list of the most useful stats only)

Viewing Statistics

A bar-chart of your yearly traffic history will be displayed when you log into Webalizer. Click the name of the month on the table graph to view the details. When you select the month, you will see a thorough analysis of your website traffic. In fact, probably more information than you will ever use.

Referrers: A “referral” is when a user reaches your site by clicking a link on a different site. Webalizer will document which site led them to you. If they discovered you during a Google search, it will inform you that it was from Google, but not what they were searching for when they discovered you. If you want to see what visitors were looking for when they clicked, then register for Google Analytics. Every page your are trying to track should have a code snippet (script) in the footer if you use Analytics.

Files and Hits: Often these are the most deceptive figures of all. Whenever a URL is entered, this registers as a “hit”. Even in instances where the URL is spelled wrong or isn’t in existence anymore. Every download that goes through – for pages, pictures, sounds, video clips and the like – is registered as a file.

Page: Pages are “hits” for existing pages, not including pictures or flash objects that aren’t actually embedded within a page. “Page” filenames usually end in “html”, “php” or “asp”, for instance.

Visitor: Visitors are generally identified via their IP address. This is misleading since some visitors might use the same ISP or might have a firewall that prevents them being correctly identified. If a visitor to a page does not quickly navigate to another, he may be counted as two visitors. The host typically is the one who decides the time limit, which is usually thirty minutes.

Webalizer also counts the Web crawlers (bots) which “crawl” your site. These can found in the “sites” segment of the rundown. You may be be shocked with the amount of spiders on your site, and how much bandwidth they consume. Preventing unwanted bots and spiders from crawling your site is simple; all you have to do is create or edit a file called “robots.txt” and place it your site’s home folder. The majority of crawlers will do what you tell them to, but they don’t have to.