Website Traffic Analysis With Webalizer

Firstly,�do not rely on a "hit counter" to analyze traffic ( Especially the "free" hit counters. I have seen more malware on servers from free hit counters than from any other source). Not only that, 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)

Viewing Statistics

As you connect to Webalizer, it displays a bar-diagram of the amount of traffic, typically for a year's time. For more information, just click on the month in the chart beneath the graph. After clicking on a given month, it displays a variety of statistical analyses of the traffic to your site. Much of the data you will not need unless you are a true guru.

Referrers: When a person clicks on a link from a different site that directs to yours, this is termed a referral. Webalizer lets you know which site was the source of the referral. In case they discovered you through a Google search, you are informed of this (you are not told what they were searching for though). Those who enroll in Google Analytics can find out what the search intent was, however it is not stored on the server. It is necessary to add a code snippet or script to every page footer that you want to monitor if you use Analytics.

Files and Hits: Often these are the most deceptive figures of all. Whenever a URL is entered, this registers as a "hit". Even in instances where the URL is spelled wrong or isn't in existence anymore. Every download that goes through - for pages, pictures, sounds, video clips and the like - is registered as a file.

Page: When a page is legitimately 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: 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.

Spiders and Bots: 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.

Stephen Grisham, Sr. is a copy writer for InfoServe Media, LLC. If you are looking for web site design, Houston has it. If you just need a few changes to an existing site, InfoServe Media also offers website maintenance.