Learning to understand your website statistics can help you improve your website for visitors, measure if your promotional strategies are working, and find new opportunities to promote your business.

How can you measure your website statistics?

There are two common ways to measure this important information.

One is with software that analyzes the server logfiles. Each time someone visits your site the server records detailed information about the visitor and what they did on your website. With software like Webalyzer or AWStats that information is put into a form you can easily read and understand. Many website hosts offer this software already installed on their servers and available to clients through a cPanel or Plesk administrative area.

The second way to keep track of your stats is with a javascript added to all of your pages that sends info to another server each time a visitor loads a page, such as Google Analytics or Crazy Egg. With these services you sign up, then they provide a small snippet of code for you to copy and paste into your web pages.

You may want to combine both methods to get a better overall picture of who is visiting your website and what they’re doing.

What do the terms mean?

Hits: Each request for a file from a server is counted as a hit. This is an often misunderstood term. It does not mean you’ve had 5,000 people visit your site if you have had 5,000 hits. If your page has one html file and five images on it, then each time a visitor loads the page it would count as six hits.

Page Views: How many times a “page” as defined in log analysis has been loaded. This is more accurate than hits because it will only count the .html or .php files instead of every image on a page.

Unique Visitors: This is an even more useful piece of information than hits or page views. Unique visitors tracks how many different computers have visited your website.

Number of Visits: How many unique sessions were logged. The way this one works is that if a visitor comes to your site today, and then again in a week, that would be counted as two visits.

Spiders Visited: Some tracking/analysis software is able to show you which “spiders” from search engines visited your site. This is an easy way to see if your site is being indexed by different search engines.

Top Pages: Which pages are the most popular on your website? Look for the top pages section of your stats to see what visitors are most interested in.

Connect to Site From or Search Phrases Used: This may be called something different depending on what software or analyzer you’re using but most will include a section allowing you to see how visitors found you. It will show if they’ve followed a link from another website, a search engine, or typed in your URL directly.

HTTP Status Codes: Your analyzer may also show you if your visitors got 404 or other errors. Watch this section to see if you’ve got a broken link or other problem somewhere on your website that you need to fix.

What metrics should you watch?

Some of the basic things you want to watch are:

Conversion rates: What % of visitors to a sales page made purchases? There’s plenty of information available on how to optimize sales pages for better conversion rates. Once you have a base measurement of your current conversion rate, start making small changes to your copy, headlines, and other page elements then watch for a change in the conversion rate to see whether changes helped.

Page views per visit: How many pages does each visitor look at? If this number is very low – one or two – then visitors aren’t being engaged enough or finding what they were looking for.

Monthly unique visitors: Is the number growing over time? Your traffic should be going up! If it’s not, time to review your promotional tactics and strategies to see where you can focus on improving.

What can you do with all that information?

Website statistics offer you a wealth of information — use it to your advantage!

Here are some easy ways to use your website statistics to build your business:

- Contact sites that refer visitors/link to your site and send them a thank you note.

- Offer sites who’ve published your articles “priority notice” of future articles you release for reprint. With permission, email your articles directly to the interested sites so your articles are easier for them to publish.

- Watch the popular pages of your website then focus on building those pages with better copywriting, promote affiliate products, etc.

- Look for trends in the type of websites that are referring visitors to your site and use it to better target your marketing efforts.

Is your website running as smoothly as it could be? Here are eight important points to check the function and professionalism of your website.

1) Compatible

Is your website compatible with all the major search engines? Test it on as many browsers as you can, and do a check at browsershopts.org to see what it looks like in other browsers and on other operating systems.

2) Complete

Is your website complete? Be sure there aren’t missing pieces or incomplete pages.

3) Clean and Confident

Your design and layout should be “clean” and project a confident voice. Never talk down about your projects or your business. Owning a small business is nothing to be ashamed of! You can offer fantastic products and fabulous service to your customers. Do your absolute best and be confident in that.

4) Focus Drawn Immediately to Product/Services

What do you want your shoppers to see? Should they focus on a crazy, busy background? Only if your background is for sale. Otherwise, you want the shoppers eye to be immediately drawn to the products or services you offer. Make sure your header area and graphics are a reasonable size and load quickly so they don’t take over the focus of the page.

5) Clean HTML Coding

This is important for compatibility, accessibility, and search engine rankings, too. Check your code at validator.w3.org and make any necessary updates.

6) Valid Links

Are there any broken links on your website? If so, fix them! Run a free check at validator.w3.org/checklink to get started.

7) Quick Download Time

Visitors will not wait long for your page to load. If it doesn’t come up quick, they’ll click away without taking time to browse. Avoid this by being sure that your images are optimized to load quickly and that your code is clean and error-free. Be especially carefully with flash or animated elements.

Consistent Brand and Voice

Keep your target market in mind as you write your website and use a consistent voice throughout your website. Also be sure that your branding is consistent throughout the pages of your website, your products, your emails, your sales invoice/packing slips, etc. Match your logo, your fonts, and your style so it’s easy for clients and potential clients to identify any piece of your business, marketing, or sales materials.

Are you considering starting your own blog? You may wonder whether you should:

* go with a blogging service that’s hosted on another server where you get a subdomain like yourbusiness.bloggingsite.com

* put your blog on your own domain and hosting space so your blog is at yourbusiness.com or yourbusiness.com/blog

Here are five great reasons to consider using WordPress on your own domain.

5) You can choose your theme.

There are thousands of free themes available for WordPress and you can only use them if you host your own WordPress blog. Just Google “WordPress theme” and you’ll find many websites offering stylish themes.

With many other blogging services you are limited to only the themes they’ve chosen to allow.

4) You can modify your theme.

With some HTML & CSS knowledge, or the help of your designer or virtual assistant, you can modify a theme to do what you need.

3) You can add any plugins you’d like.

One of my favorite things about WordPress is that there are so many fantastic plugins available. You can choose which work best for you and install anything you’d like on your own blog.

2) You’ll be building links to your own domain.

When you host your blog at a service where your blog is just a subdomain, links to “your” blog are building page rank and links for the main domain, which isn’t yours. Instead, host your own blog, and all those links will be pointed to your domain and helping to boost your domain’s page rank and links.

1) It’s free, but has a great support community.

WordPress is free to download and install. But that doesn’t mean you’re without support. Because it’s such as popular blogging platform there are many forums and sites dedicated to it where you can go to find answers to your questions.