The first step is to not rely on a “hit counter” (ESPECIALLY the “free” hit counters. I have seen more malware on servers from free hit counters than from any other source). Counters are misleading and basically useless for determining the success of your website.

A lot of web hosts offer “Webalizer”. You may also have the option to install additional server-side statistics software (example AWStats). Depending on the options offered by your hosting service, you can choose which tracking tool you want to use, or even enable more than one of them simultaneously. Though this may be overkill (The amount of information you get from Webalizer is enormous) and two statistics engines may consume too many server resources.

Comprehending Webalizer (This list is by no means complete)

Finding the 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” occurs when a person clicks on your link from another site. Webalizer will inform you of the site they originated from. It can tell you whether or not the viewer found you through Google; it won’t, however, tell you what they were searching for when they located you. When you register for Google Analytics, you can find out what viewers searched for when they clicked on your page. For each web page you wish to track with Analyitics, place a code snippet (script) in the footer that you will be provided with. You may need to have your website developer do this for you.

Files and Hits: These statistics are the most misleading. It’s considered a “hit” every time a URL is entered. This includes when the URL is not spelled right or has expired. It’s considered a “file” when something is downloaded correctly (such as pages, images, sounds, videos, etc).

Page: When a “hit” occurs on a genuine page, then it is called a page. (Images or flash objects that are not embedded in a page do not count. The names of pages will end in “html”, “php”, “asp”, etc.).

Visitor: Normally the IP address is used to identify a visitor. This could be misleading since if one or more visitors use the identical ISP, or are hidden behind a firewall, they might not be correctly identified. In addition, if a visitor takes too long to move from one page to the next, they may end up being counted as two separate visitors. This usually occurs at 30 minutes but may be changed by the host.

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.