How To Track Visitors And Optimize Your Website

If you haven't used Blogger in Draft (Beta-Blogger) till now, then do it right away. It is where, Blogger releases all its new features before officially adding the services to Bloggerblogs. To access Blogger in Draft, instead of logging in to www.Blogger.com log in atdraft.Blogger.com

The latest Beta add-on from Blogger is a "Stats" section in the Dashboard - to monitor and analyze your visitor traffic in near-real-time.

Tracking your visitors' activity on your blog is an important part of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). So, if you haven't yet accessed the "Stats" section of your Blogger-account - then do it right now. And as of now "Blogger Stats" is relatively new and limited in terms of the information these tools provide, so even now I advise everyone to sign up at the below mentioned websites/services, start tracking to give your visitors what they want (that's what SEO is all about)...



You would have seen many fancy and flashy visitor counters in hundreds or rather thousands of blogs, but simply counting the number of visitors or page views is totally of no use to anyblogger or webmaster. Visitor-Tracking is a much more advanced and useful method as compared to those simple counters.

So here's a list of important tracking websites, providing free and fabulous features to all the bloggers...
The tracking reports and statistics from these websites mainly contain:

1. Of course, unique visits & page views, averaged and archived to weekly, monthly and yearly graphs. (And all the reports are in real time)

2. You can also view the details like, visitors IP addresses, time spent by them browsing your website, pages visited, and their returning visits. Moreover, you can even check the operating system your visitor is using, their screen resolution, their browser with version and whether Java or Flash is enabled on their system or not.

3. And the most important statistical-reports for you are of course related to Search EngineOptimization (SEO); these include the keywords through which they entered your site, list of search engines which referred visitors to your website.

You can easily track the activities of your visitors for completely FREE, by placing simple JavaScripts on your blog provided by websites like StatCounter and Google. Statcounter gives a simple script, which when placed in to your template starts collecting all the above mentioned information, which is then displayed to you. The stats are simple to browse-through and understand. Using these stats you can improve your blogs structure & content. You should also focus and improve the important posts of your blog which bring maximum traffic to you.

The most important tracking site of course belongs to Google. Being a blogger you cannot afford to miss this one: Google Analytics. Although it may take a little more time to understand all the statistical data displayed at G-Analytics completely and even more time to analyse the data and use it to effectively plan your SEO strategies, but being a Google product it will not only provide complete tracking details as provided by other similar services, but it does help a lot in Search engine optimization (SEO) too.

In Statcounter, to get some of the advanced features, including an increase in log size, a paid account or an upgrade is needed, but at Google-Analytics everything is free, rather they even have an advanced beta section for interested members.

And finally a must for everybody is an account in Google Webmaster Tools, where you have to simply submit your websites sitemap to access the most important SEO details.
The stats shown by GWT are not directly about your visitors, but are
You can see the number of pages indexed by Google, pages/articles deleted by you, pages restricted for Google. And you can even see how many website/webpages around the Internet have linked to your website (and to which specific page). How well are your internal pages are connected. And again, one of the most important, you will be shown how many pages of your website has high, medium, low or no PageRank.

So finally I will suggest you to get an account in:

(1) Google Analytics, (2) Google Webmaster Tools and (3) Statcounter


And just for fun, if you want to know how many people are online on your website at a time (real time), then put a widget from Amung.us, that doesn't even need you to register :)