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Just The Stats, Ma'am
By Larry Westfall
With apologies to SGT Joe Friday, you need check your stats to see what is going on with your website. There are a few free tools that will allow you to do that. In your server's Control Panel, you should have a couple of statistical tools to analyze your site. AWStats and Webalizer are two of the most popular and are used on most servers to read and analyze logs. Another tool you can use is Google Analytics but that requires that you place a bit of code on your site and have an account at Google. All three tools will give you information about your site and they will all be different. You may see that you had 50 visitors using Google Analytics, 100 using AWStats and 250 using Webalizer. So, which one is correct? All three. The problem is they count visitors differently. One may count every hit to a page and another may distinguish between humans and bots. So, it is difficult to get an accurate count of visitors to your site. However, you can use the tool to see trends. You can see if you are getting more or fewer visitors this month than last. You can check and see where your visitors are coming from, which words they searched to find your site, and how long they stayed. For me, seeing that I am getting more visitors than last month, even though I don't know the precise amount, is good enough. Knowing what words and phrases they used to find me is more important. Since a lot of traffic comes from search engines, it is vital to know what someone did to find you. Then you can focus on that phrase or word more often on your posts in order to attract more visitors. You may also find that someone searched for a 4 or 5 word phrase and they wound up on your site. See if you can use that phrase more often in your postings. All of the stats programs will also show where your visitors are coming from and what time of day that they visit. This can help you target certain areas if you are using pay-per-click advertising. Remember that they are statistics and numbers may not be exact but the stats can show trends as you will see in the attached image. I had this site and was using it to display some photos of Khon Kaen, Thailand. It received some visitors in early 2010, but not many. I retired in March 2010, and changed the format of the site to a blog the following month and started recording daily happenings, added photos and videos, and wrote about my retired life. I started getting serious about search engine optimization (SEO) and getting my page ranked higher in August and have continued to work on optimizing my site. The picture shows the results. So, use a stats program to delve deeper into your site and see what is attracting people to it and work on getting more and more visitors. It will pay off.
Larry Westfall is a retired expat living out his golden years in Khon Kaen, Thailand. He enjoys riding his mountain bike for daily exercise and taking photos of Thailand.
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This intel was contributed by larry
larry
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May, 2012
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