Don’t forget to regularly check your web server logs. This is how I discovered people were linking to me. Check your referral listings to see how people found your site — invaluable information. This stuff can help you optimize your site, see what search engines are finding you, what your most popular (and unpopular) content is, even what keywords were used on search engines to find you.
If your web host or blog host doesn’t provide this information for you, then you need a new provider.
Comments
2 responses to “Watch Your Logs”
Jon, I’d recommend StatCounter as a backup to your server logs. It’s great to be able to watch your visitors arrive by the minute or hour, or day, depending on how well you’re doing 🙂 It gives you tonnes of stats, including where people came from and what their path through your site was. It’s free for a small log history, which at the moment is doing me fine 🙂
Ian, This looks interesting, especially for those people who don’t have log analysis tools available from their web hosts. I currently use awstats & webalizer off of my apache logs. Since I do my own web hosting, I have full access to all my logs. What I do like about StatCounter is the repeat visitor stats. I may have to give this a try.