How To? Learn anything step by step!

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-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.)

Comprehending Webalizer (This list is by no means complete)

Finding the Statistics

The first thing you see when you log in to Webalizer, is a bar-chart showing the traffic history of your site. By default, this will show up to a year’s worth of data. To view the details, click the month as listed in the chart below the table. Clicking on the appropriate month will provide a record of activity to your website.

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: These statistics are the most misleading. Every time a URL is put in, it is considered a “hit”. This is still true if the URL has stopped working or if it was misspelled. A “file” is every completed download whether it be pages, images, sounds, or videos.

Page: When a page is legitimatly accessed, then it is counted as a page (This does not include images or flash objects not embedded in the page). Pages can have names that end in “html”, “php”, “asp”, and so on.

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 registers “bot” activity on your website – such as Google’s “spider” Internet crawler. You can find evidence of these in the “sites” segment of the statistics. It might amaze you when you discover the amount of spiders coming to your site and the amount of bandwidth they take up in doing so. If you want to prevent undesirable bots from visiting your site, make or alter the “robots.txt” file on your computer. While the majority of spiders will heed your request, nothing legally regulates this.