How To Track Visitors And Optimize Your Website

---

You would have seen many fancy and flashy visitor counters in hundreds or rather thousands of blogs, but counting the number of visitors or page views is totally of no use to any blogger or webmaster.
Visitor tracking is a much more advanced method as compared to those simple counters.

So here are the four tracking websites, providing free and fabulous features to all the bloggers:

The tracking reports and statistics from these website mainly contains:
1. Of course unique visits and page views, averaged and archived to weekly, monthly and yearly graphs. (And all the reports are in real time)
2. In detail, you can see their IP addresses, time spent browsingyour website, pages visited, and their returning visits. And not only these but you can even check the operating system your visitor is using, their screen resolution, their browser with version, and whether java or flash is enabled on their system or not.
3. Along with graphs, averaged values of time spent by all visitors, location of visitors, popular pages etc. are also shown.
4. The details you will be interested more, are of course related tosearch engine optimization, these include the keywords through which they entered your site, list of search engines which referred visitors to your website.

For all these features you can select between SiteMeter andStatCounter.
Although I would suggest you to go with Statcounter, as it is more user friendly, but adding both of them would be better, to get maximum possible details.

 
Now third on the list is most the important of these three,Analytics from Google itself. So obviously it will not only provide complete tracking details as provided by the two above listed, but it even helps a lot in Search engine optimization.

In Statcounter and Sitemeter, to get some of the advanced features, including an increase in log size, a paid account or an upgrade is needed, but in Google everything is free, rather they even have a beta section for interested members.

And finally a must for everybody is an account in Google Webmaster Tools, where you have to submit your website's sitemap, and the most important details will be shown to you.
These are although NOT about your visitors but these are ultimately aimed to optimize your website.
You can see the number of pages indexed by Google, pages/articles deleted by you, pages restricted for Google. And you can even see how many website/webpages around the Internet have linked toyour website (and to which specific page). How well are your internal pages are connected. And again, one of the most important, you will be shown how many pages of your website has high, medium, low or no PageRank.

So finally I will suggest you to get an account in 
Google Analytics,
Google Webmaster Tools,
and Statcounter

 
And just for fun, if you want to know how many people are online on your website at a time (real time), then put a widget from Amung.us, that doesn't even need you to register :)     http://bloggerstop.net/2008/11/how-to-track-visitors-and-optimize-your.html