When trying to optimize your website, you will need to gather all the information about the few visitors that you now have. This will help you make improvements to your site and increase your traffic. One of the best ways to gather this statistical data is through the use of a counter.

Some of you may not know that dropping a counter onto each page of your website will not only show you the number of hits to that page, but also logs tidbits of important information too.

The following is a list of some of the data that is collected from a stat-counter.

Screen Resolution

Knowing the screen resolution tells you how the majority of visitors view your web pages. For example: If your design is based around 800 x 600 screen resolution, and the majority of you visitors use a 1024 x 768 resolution, you may want to redesign your layout.

Keyword

If a visitor was directed to your site by a search engine, then knowing the search term used will help in optimizing your page around important keywords relevant to you sites topic.

Length Of Visit

This is important that if everyone is showing up to your site, but doesn't seem to stay, then check for slow loading of you page or some other reason that might turn away visitors.

Enter-Page/ Exit-Page

If your visitors are leaving from the same page they first come to, then you will need to figure out why they are not visiting other pages. Maybe the links to the other pages are hidden by too much clutter, are too small or non-descriptive.

Returning Visitors

This will help you determine which pages your visitors find important. You can then concentrate more effort on those topics.

There are many more tidbits of statistical data a stat-counter can provide, and best of all you can get them for free. Theses services are provided for the benefit of building back links, and in hopes to sell you upgrades.

If you think that a counter looks tacky, you have the option to make it invisible. This will still enable you to collect important statistical data without your visitors seeing the counter itself.

So if your serious about getting more traffic, you must first learn all you can from the traffic you already have, and a free stat-counter is one of the best places to start.