Web Counters and Analytics

Web Counters-
A web counter or hit counter is a computer software program that indicates the number of visitors, or hits, a particular webpage has received. Once set up, these web counters will be incremented by one every time the web page is accessed in a web browser.

Web Counter Information:
Some statistics from your web counter will provide a report on what is sometimes called "Visitor Path" or "Path Through". This report shows the series of pages that your users visit when they reach your site. For example, the report may show that the visitors first arrive at your main page, and then move on to your products list and your the price list, before reaching your shopping cart page. This information can help you understand what your visitors are looking for and what they are interested in. It can also help you evaluate whether the navigational structure of your website is conducive for getting your visitors where they want to go. Many of the web analytics software provide a report on the search engine key phrases that visitors used to successfully find your site. Some software not only give a summary of the key phrases, but also breaks it down according to the pages you have on your site. This is very useful in determining what visitors are looking for when they arrive at your pages. This helps you adjust your site accordingly. Key phrase information also lets you know whether the specific web page you're looking at is sufficiently search engine friendly. For example, if you think that a particular phrase appropriately describe that page, but you notice that no one seems to have ever located that page on your site using that key phrase, then perhaps that page needs some work

Types of Web Counters:
Most webmasters, hosted on a commercial web host, probably rely on the default web statistics software provided by their web host. This is typically one of the free web statistics and analytics software that you can also download and install on your web account yourself.

Not all of these software provide sufficient information for your use. For example, I personally find that Webalizer and Analog lack many useful reports. They are probably okay if you run a simple personal site and don't plan to do much with it. Http-analyze is slightly better, but it still fails to provide useful things like key phrases, visitor paths and even little things like the referring URLs of those pesky 404 errors