Tracking Links

[arib]

Hi,
How can I find out from where the visitor has come to my website?

[Ossifer]

Look at the referrer in your web logs or in the request variables.

[arib]

Thanks for your reply What are referrers and what are web logs & request variables.

[Receptional]

Hi Arib.

To find out how many people are visiting your site and where they are from, you will need to do one of the following:

1) Ask you hosting company if they provide web statistics. Most do. That will be somplest for you in the short term. They should simply give you a link (with login required) and the data should be there.

2) If they don't provide stats, they should at least provide the raw data that stats packages use to display this for you. These are called "log files". You can then use a log file analyzer to analyse these. See [webmasterworld.com...] for a list.

3) Easier than log files is to put a little "tag" (snippet of code) on every web page which links to a stats analyzer system. I prefer this method anyway, but many people in this forum argue differently. Again, look at the list at [webmasterworld.com...] for "tag " based tracking systems.

[arib]

Thanks
What if I design my own tracking system.Will that be too complicated and it doesnt really sound that hard.
But I dont have any idea how would I go about tracking Search Engine spiders.Is that a hard part?

[peewhy]

Do you have access to you raw log files?

[arib]

no i dont right now

[peewhy]

It might be tht you do without knowing. Email your host and ask how you access the log files, you'll probably have a control panel.