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All visits to your site are logged by the server application. Log files contain information about the origin of the visitor (their IP address), the type of browser they were using, which pages they viewed, how long they stayed, whether or not they arrived from a search engine & if so, what keywords they used to locate your site. All useful information.

Now that your web-site is up & walking you require to know how lots of people are visiting your site & how they are finding it. Most web hosts give you access to this information (& a lot more) in the form of web statistics.

Most web hosts will include a stats program as part of their hosting package. You ought to be able to access it through the control panel which is used to make various settings on your account. A quantity of the popular web stat programs are AWStats, Analog, & WebAlizer. All six of these programs are free.

The trouble is, raw log files are scary to look at & impossible to make any sense of. They are long lists of numbers & cryptic words that can only reveal their secrets with the aid of a statistics program. There's a few stats programs to pick from. They take the raw server logs & parse them in to readable (& sometimes colourful) charts that are easy to interpret.

Stats programs divide the information of the log files in to useful categories. A summary of the information may be included at the top of the readout & tell you information such as ‘unique visitors’, ‘number of hits’, & ‘number of pages’.

Not all this information is important. The number of hits, for example, basically counts the total number of requests for any individual part of your site including graphics, script files & any other files that are part of a page. If your home page has 4 pics & 2 other files the hit count is increased by 7 each time somebody views that page.

The number of page views is important because it tells you which pages are popular. This lets you adjust your site by dropping or modifying unpopular pages & making sure that popular pages link to areas that you require to promote.

Popular entry & exit pages are also worth tweaking. Visitors won't always arrive at your site through the home page, if they’ve found your site through a search engine. Make sure that popular entry pages contain relevant information & adjust exit pages to be more appealing. Exit pages should provide two last chance for them to buy or bookmark your site for future reference.

than rely on the stats produced by your server, you can hire a third party service to monitor your web-site. These services range from basic ‘counter’ that usually offer less information than your server does, to comprehensive client-side stats collection.

Referring sites show you where people are coming from. If they have found you from a search engine you will also see what keywords they used to find your site. This information tells you which keywords are important for optimizing your site. You can then design new content based on these keywords to attract even more visitors in the future.

Stats services can be useful if you require more precise information about your visitors. For example, visitors from a huge organization may all appear to be the same because they all have the same IP address. Stat services can break down IP addresses in to individual users. free desktop wallpapers are found on these sites

These services can be useful for more precise monitoring of your web-site & for targeting specific niches. Most site owners, however, will find useful information in their server’s statistics.
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