Website hits

[kerrijnagle]

Ive just started doing websites and have done several for my company and one for my husband who is trying to set up a business making picture frames.

The thing is, I really dont know much about how to get high up in the rankings on google etc.

I know there are ways you can track who and where people are from on your site but how do I do this?

Sorry if Im asking stupid questions but Im a novice at this!

Thanks

[TWD-Tony]

The tools should be already provided by the webhost. If you are using a payed host then you will be using a control panel like cPanel or Ensim or Plesk. These should have options for "statistics" which should then analyse your logs and produce very pretty patterns and graphs etc

The common tools that are USUALLY provided are Urchin, Webaliser and AWstats. If you cannot find them in your control panel then maybe you should ask your host if they are installed on the server. If they are not installed then you have a problem - you cannot installed them yourself without root access to the box.
The other option is to use a 3rd party analyser that places a bit of code on your page and then uses that to track visitors - the downside of this is that you can only put ONE piece of code on ONE page, so you can only track visitors on that one page - the software mentioned above will track visitors accross all your pages.

[Ian J]

Originally Posted by TWD-Tony

the downside of this is that you can only put ONE piece of code on ONE page, so you can only track visitors on that one page.

I use Extreme tracking which costs me $15 per quarter but that gives me a code for each of my pages and I use it on many pages across several sites. One feature that I also like is that it allows you to exclude up to four IP addresses so that it won't record my visits to my own site.

[peterjhale]

trouble with extreme is that anyone can look at yr stats


I mainly look through my cpanel at my stats. For the really important pages I monitor by adding free statcounter to those particular pages

[Ian J]

Only the freebie version is open to public scrunity as the paid version is password protected.

[MarkD]

If you are targeting customers local to your business then it should be easier for you to get your page returned nearer to the first page on google, msn etc. Just localise your content town , county etc. I wouldn't worry about rankings too much it will come with time if you have plenty of good content about "picture framing" and get onto a few local directory listings,then you will be ok.