Who is visiting, and from where?
There is an exceptionally free tool from Google (of course, who else offers so much for so little?). The tool is Google Analytics. You use your Google account (if you dont' have one, you need one - so when your finished reading this, head on over and make yourself one). I wasn't sure what it would be all about when I first set it up, but it has some excellent stats about your blog (or any other website you set it up with).
Now, if you are using a blogging service (i.e. blogger, wordpress, typepad or any of the other umpteen million blog hosting services available), you probably don't have access to the server logs. That is, there is no way for you to see who is visiting your blogs. Which ones are being read the most, where people are coming from, what keywords are used and what search engines are serving readers to your blog. If you host your own blog, you can get all of this information from the log files (but it can be a pain in the rear if you don't have a log aggregator to put it all in readable format).
Enter Google Analytics. It takes a day or so to actually get it up and running because after you put the code in your template, Google has to go out and find it. So, you put a little snippet of code in your blog template, it's a small javascript.
After putting that somewhere in your template, and getting it synched with Google - remember, it may take a day or so to get it actually cranking out data. You can look at all kinds of metrics about your site. For instance, with this blog, I found that while I don't have many visitors, I do have some from India, Venezuela and Japan. How cool is that? Foreign folks, reading little old me. I am still trying to understand all the data in GA and maybe I can find out how these visitors found little old me.
As you can see, the tool is very visual, but the charts, etc can be turned off so all you see is the raw data (I don't know why you'd want to, but there are all kinds out there aren't there?)
I wanted to kind of introduce you to Google Analytics in this post. I am going to put my family domain in the GA tool to see what it looks like. It has a PR of 1 for some reason, I don't know why because nothing links to it that I know if, but then again, it has been active and serving pages since about 1997, so maybe it has that simply based on it's age. Another one I'm going to do is a parked domain of a similar name. It used to be loaned to a bull fighter in spain (who happens to share my last name) so that might be interesting to see what it hitting that domain.
Anyway, over the weekend I'll add those two domains and walk you all through it so you can see what it takes. Not that it's complicated and you couldn't do it on your own if you wanted to.
As always, I sincerely appreciate your visits. Come back soon! -- OH, and a big WELCOME to you folks from Japan, India and Venezuela (tell your friends ok? - ok, thanks)
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