Some bloggers and website owners do not take this matter very seriously. Specially, hobby bloggers can do this mistake more often. This is a very serious issue. You must know about your visitors. Fortunately, there are some free sofwares and web-services for you. You don’t need to spend a single dollar but you can a lot of information about your stats and visitors. I am fond of basically two things in this regard: Sitemeter and Google Analytics. Sitemeter has a paid version but the basic free version is more than enough for most bloggers. In fact, you can see Sitemeter in some high profile blogs like Problogger.

How to Signup and Use Sitemeter?

Just visit their website: http://www.sitemeter.com/ and you will find that the signup process is very easy. It wont take more than 5 minutes. You will notice that there are two options: basic (free) and premium (paid). I have used the premium version and it is cool but the basic version has more than a typical blogger would need. After you signup then you will get a code to put any part of your website. Normally, I like to put in the footer. You can see Sitemeter of this blog in the bottom part. If you have any problem in putting the code in your blog, please let me know your question in the comment section and I will try to help you.

What kind of information do you get from Sitemeter?

First of all, in the Summary page, you can get information like how many visitors have visited your blog or website from the first time you installed Sitemeter. Then you can know the average visitors per day for one week. How many visitors came in the last one hour and today and this week. The same kind of information you can find about the page views. You can also know the amount of average time that a visitor spends in your website. All these stats are great and you get them without paying anything. You will be happy to know that you get even more from the free version.

If you look the left side of your summary page then you will find links to even more pages that would give you more stats. You can know about the visitors who are in your website at this moment. You can know about their IP, location, entry pages, exit pages etc. You can also get information about daily visitors and page views in the last one week and one month. In the Referrals section, you can find information about your last 100 visitors. There is still some more and you should find them yourselves.

Benefits of Sitemeter

The first benefit that I can find is that it is free and yet very powerful and full of rich features.

You may wonder that Sitemeter would reveal all the secrets about your blog. You don’t need to be worried because it has an option of not displaying your stats to others. This way, with your username and password, you will only know about all the stats.

Google Analytics

I am a big fan of Google and all its products and services. Google Analytics is perhaps the best tool for tracking about your visitors and yet it is absolutely free. Even you do not need to do a new signup if you already have a Google account. Just take a look at the features that it has: http://www.google.com/analytics/features.html

I have to say that Google has given us a business class product without charging anything. It is more than enough for majority of bloggers and website owners. So, you should signup with it without any delay. Implementing in your website is very easy too.

The best thing that I like about it is that it gives you all the information that you need. For example, you want to know that in the last one month, which entry or post of your blog received the most amount of visitors- no problem. You can know about the keywords. You can also know about your traffic source- whether your blog gets traffic from search engines or from non search engine based sources. Google Analytics would also give you information about geographical source of your visitors.

Why do you need to know about your visitors and stats?

It does not matter whether you are a problogger or hobby blogger. You should know about your visitors. You opened a blog in the first place to reach to others. Or else, you can email yourself about your thoughts. By knowing about your visitors, you can get good insight about the topics they are searching for. If you know what things people like then you can write about them more and this way, you can increase your visitors and page views. A blog without any Stat Counter is like a blind one. The blogger would have no idea that how many people are reading about what.