nas-112-52.slc.navinet.net - - [29/Jan/2000:17:17:12 -0500] "GET page.html HTTP/1.1" 200 23443 "http://www.mydomain.com/page.html" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows 98)"

Referer Log The referrer log contains referral information - source that referred visitor to your site. If referrer was a search engine, you will also find keywords that were entered to find your site - very useful information. Here are some example records. The record below shows that visitor followed a link from somedomain.com to index page of site.

http://www.somedomain.com/page.html -> /

This record shows that visitor came to my site from a search engine link. Notice keyword data is included in record.

http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=design+tips -> /

Agent Log This log provides information on which browser and operating system was used to access your site.

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;MSIE 5.01; Windows 98)

Error Log The error log obviously provides a record of errors generated by server and sent back to client. The record below shows type of server, date and time of error, client identification, explanation of error code generated by server, and path to file that caused error.

apache: [Sun Jan 30 10:09:57 2000][error] [client 195.238.2.162] File does not exist:/u/web/mydomain/favicon.ico

As you can see, log files contain a wealth of information about how your visitors are using your site. Now we will talk about how you get relevant data extracted from log files and compiled into a useable format.

In Part 3 of this article series, we'll discuss Web Traffic Analysis Software.

Herman Drost is a Certified Web Site Designer (CIW), owner and author of iSiteBuild.com Affordable Hosting, Site Design and Promotion Packages http://www.isitebuild.com

Counting hits is not same as tracking pageviews. It takes multiple hits to view a page.

Pageview/Impression – this is number of times a page is accessed as a whole.

Unique View - A page view by a unique person within a 24 hour period.

Referrer - A page that links to your site. By looking at your referrers will tell you who's linked to your site. This can be particularly valuable for seeing where your search engine traffic is coming from.

User Agent - This refers to software used to access your site. Sometimes known as a "browser" or "client", term user agent can describe a PHP script, a browser like Internet Explorer, or a search engine spider like GoogleBot. If you can identify what software is being used to access your site, you'll be able to tell if users are abusing it, and when search engines last crawled your pages.

In Part 2 of this article series we'll look at some of ways to track your web site visitors.

Herman Drost is a Certified Web Site Designer (CIW), owner and author of iSiteBuild.com Affordable Hosting, Site Design and Promotion Packages http://www.isitebuild.com