For quite some time, I’ve been using Google Analytics for my WordPress-powered blog as my primary tool in tracking and analyzing my website’s traffic. It’s a free service (like other Google features) for site statistics and help site owners in their decision-making, site planning, and marketing. It benefits even more those site owners who avail user Google Adwords to increase their marketing, since that service works in conjunction with Google Analytics.

Recently, I found another free statistical tool that works similarly like Google Analytics. However, unlike Analytics, it does not work only as an invisible web tracker, but it can be configured to act as a hit counter too. It is also much faster and responsive, quickly loading than the Google counterpart. It accurately reports site statistics in real-time. The reportage includes popular pages, entry and exit pages, referring sites, keyword analysis, search engines, visitor information, paths and length, visitor map, among others.

It only takes four steps to get started with StatCounter. First, you need to register an account at StatCounter website. Then, you create a project for web tracking: it could be the whole website or just the major pages you want to comprehensively analyze. Finally, StatCounter gives you the snippet code that you just “copy and paste” to web page before the closing tag of the body. If you already experienced Google Analytics, you will observe that the application process is almost the same.

Bloggers who own sites powered by WordPress platform (like me) can also take advantage of StatCounter’s plugin. Like other WordPress plugins, this web tracker plugin is easy to install and use. Once it’s activated, it begins to track visitors from any page and reports more in detail the web traffic than any other WordPress statistics plugins.

Question: Can I put two web trackers on my web page? Yes. That is what I do with my websites. This website, for instance, is being tracked by Google Analytics and StatCounter. Each web tracker has its own strengths and weaknesses, but the weaknesses of one are complemented by the other. For Adwords users, Google Analytics may help you better in your web marketing; otherwise StatCounter offers more detailed web traffic report. The only minor rant I have with StatCounter free account is that its logs are limited to 500 entries only – but still enough for small to medium-sized websites or blogs. If you think your site is large, you can consider upgrading to larger log quota in various denominations. The cheapest upgrade is US$9 per month for 1500 log quota. But then again, I believe you’ll get the worth of your pay with StatCounter.

Click here to visit StatCounter website.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of my favorite buzzwords in the Web 2.0 era. It refers to the process of improving the volume of visitors, the quality of traffic from search engines, and higher ranking of a website in search engine results page (SERP).

SEO is significant to site owners (regardless of the nature of the site) because it promotes greater chance of getting a higher position in SERP. Higher rank usually means greater probabilities of being searched by people, bringing traffic to their website and creating opportunities. If you just created a blog website powered by WordPress or you have an existing site that is not optimized, here are the most common effective methods you can do to improve your SERP rank.

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