Obtaining Website Statistics
If you want to know how smoothly you site is running, how many visitors it is attracting, how efficiently it is being used by Google and how high up it is appearing in search engine lists, all factors which are ultimately vital to publicity and business, then knowing your website statistics is absolutely essential. Taking http://www.indigoextra.com as an example, I shall briefly run you through how this can be done easily for free. The important thing is, of course, to continue checking all these stats regularly to see how performance changes with differing site content and numbers of hits; this gives you the most valuable information.
Having set up the Indigoextra website, I would then register, for free, on a site like Alexa or statscounter.com, as the site administrator and these statistics sites would then give all sorts of information about my site for free. Common website analytics statistics include the usual basics like amount of traffic (that is number of hits, or in real terms visitors, to the site), along with other detailed stats like keyword weightings and crawling stats. Crawling is what Google does when it is indexing all the sites out there on the web. You can even see how many times in the past Google has crawled your site with archive stats like these. Such information is great for seeing how your site has changed over time.
If all this seems like a bit of a hassle, just remember that the analytics sites you are using, for free, are doing nearly all of the work for you. Also, if you follow the data carefully and act upon it prudently, it is relatively easy to increase site traffic and Google ranking.