Dr. Website
Keeping Track of Your Site's Visitors
In this issue, Dr. Website addresses several questions related to site traffic: how to keep track of who's visiting your pages, where they're linking from, and how to increase opportunities for search engines to steer users in your direction.
Dear Dr. Website®: I receive a weekly printout of our statistics for my company's Web site. It's a program that tracks the stats, and it lists, among other things, total hits, unique URLs, unique hosts, and "304s." Besides total hits, I have no idea what these mean. Can you help?
The total number of unique URLs is the number of separate pages requested by all users, including any nonexistent URLs requested in error. The total of unique hosts is the number of separate machines that request files; this is more useful for counting unique visits rather than unique users, because there are some machines--such as proxy gateways for the large online services--that request files for many users.
A 304 occurs when a file has already been served to the user and is cached--that is, it is resourced from the user's machine when it needs to display again instead of being transmitted once more from the host machine.
The number refers to the HTTP status code that describes this situation. A couple of status codes that may be more familiar to Web users include 403 (access is forbidden) and 404 (URL is not found). If you actively try to reduce your server load by reusing graphics instead of storing many unique ones, for example, you'll see an increase in the number of 304s.
Dear Dr. Website®: Is there any way to determine what other sites have links to my site and what the URLs of those sites are?
A standard way to check which sites contain links to yours is by analyzing your server's referer_log file. A more convenient--and less technical--method is provided by the Alta Vista search engine.
With Alta Vista, enter a search query like this one in the form: link:http://www.my company.com/. That will return a list of Web pages that reference the URL http://www.mycompany.com/.
Several browsers, although not Netscape's, pass a "referer" header field to the Web server.
This field tells the server the URL of the last document the client displayed immediately before coming to yours. In many cases, users follow hyperlinks from one page to another, so it's likely that the "referer" page contains a link to yours.
You may find some false returns in the referer_log. If users access your site by typing in your URL, you'll find that the previous page they viewed probably has no connection to your site. Ask your system administrator for help parsing your server's referer_log.
Dear Dr. Website®: I manage a Web site that is listed with Yahoo and other search services, but I wonder if we would reach more folks by adding representative keywords to our home pages and section pages referenced from the home pages. I have seen keywords on other sites but didn't want to clutter our pages if search engines would not really "see" them. What's the best way to do this?
The appropriate way to include information about your Web pages for indexing or cataloging programs is to use the <META> tag (for describing "meta information") within the <HEAD> part of your Web documents.
You would use the NAME attribute to describe the type of information and the CONTENT attribute to list the keywords themselves, as in the following example using HTML code:
<METAŹNAME="keywords" CONTENT="word1 word2">
The descriptive terms you use in the CONTENT attribute should add to, not repeat, the terms used in the <TITLE> tag.
Are you harried about HTML? Troubled about transparent GIFs? Please send your site development questions to Dr. Website at webdoc@iw.com or visit the Ask Dr. Website page.
Reprinted from Web Week, Volume 2, Issue 2, February 1996 © internet.com Corporation All rights reserved. Keywords: tracking Date: 19960301
