One vital tool you need as a webmaster for your site or blog is accurate website statistics. Its like a gauge for the health of your website, much like a doctor or mechanic would use for analysis. The most popular, because its free and normally comes with your hosting package is Awstats or Webalizer. They are accessible through the website’s cPanel, control panel usually provided by your web host. Awstats offers the best package with valuable info such as which file types on your website are getting the most visitors, which pages are getting the most hits, the number of visits you get from each search engine, the exact search key phrases that these visitors are using to find your site, and which linked sites are sending you the best and most traffic. All this information is valuable if you want long term success with your site. Analyzing which keywords phrases are bringing in visitors from which search engines tells you what’s popular and what’s not. You can then search Yahoo or Google by typing in the exact key words your visitors used, then you can find out what position you’re at for those particular key words. You can also see how many times your visitors land on a ‘404 Document Not Found Page’. If there’s lots, you can always customize or redirect these 404 visitors directly to your homepage. There is no point losing these visitors. There are also numerous WordPress plugins and free sources to help bloggers by simply inserting tracking codes onto their blogs. Google Analytics is one of the best free services and thus gets the most attention. There are however several other sources that are worth trying out. Here are Top 10 helpful tools and applications, services and plugins for running stats tracking for your WordPress blog. 10 Tools for Running Stats in WordPress The plugins are designed to work in version 2.5 or better for WordPress. Also, be aware that installing any or all of these stats packages may decrease your blog’s response time.
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