Know Your Visitors
By Ernest Black
There are
several things you need to know about your site: who's visiting it, where they're coming from, how many of your pages they visit, how long they stay, and which browsers they use. You also need to know which search engines are driving traffic to your site and which keywords or key phrases visitors are searching on to optimize your site's search results. All Web servers record this data in server logs, which you can analyze by using Web traffic analysis programs.
Web traffic analysis applications broadly fall into three market sectors: small business (small sites); enterprise (medium to large, complex sites); and service provider (large data centers or ISP hosts). Within these sectors are further distinctions based on the performance and features a business requires.
If you're a small business with your site hosted by an ISP, you can either use a budget-conscious Web traffic analysis program or the Web traffic software your host provides. In the first case, you may download the server logs to your local machine for processing; in the second case, the host does the processing and reporting for you. Either choice is economical; the service provided by your ISP is most likely free as part of your package (though you may have little control over the settings), but the small, inexpensive business programs ($495 for
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