I have a few questions, and I know a lot of people are here are generous with their time and answers. -What's a good way to get a comprehensive look at my traffic - can you recommend any places where I can tell how many uniques I get, and where my visiters are coming from? -Could someone explain article submission and its positive effects on traffic? Thanks, Dan Kenitz
Who is your host, Dan? If it's even a slightly decent host, it should have free awstat service that gives you all manner of stats, from number of uniques to impressions to hits to bandwidth usage to referrals to search engine query phrases. Check with your host to see if they have a free stat service -- they should, since almost every does. Failing this, grab yourself a free stat counter from, well, statcounter.com, or some place similar. Everyone is giving away free stat counters that comes complete with all the features mentioned above. I've never submitted articles, so I can't say for sure what you get, but I'm guessing one of the benefits are free backlinks back to your site from people who decide to use your article on their sites, and you get your work and your name (plus your site's URL) "out there" to the public. Others can probably fill in more about th benefits of this.
GoDaddy.com - I haven't liked them since I've signed up. They make me pay for traffic features that don't even seem to be appearing. To be honest, it sounds like a lot of investment with diminished returns. I'm more willing to spend my own money in advertising until I see the traffic I like, and continue working on content and making the site worth returning to.
Goaddy gives you free stats, Dan. You'll have to set up a password in your CP, and then you can access the stats using http://www.yourdomain.com/stats I think most people submit articles because it's easy and doesn't take a whole lot of time, and it's just another way of building backlinks that, in theory, increases your visibility in search engines.
Ugh. Boy do I feel like an idiot - I've had these stats the whole time. What is a "page request" by the way?
I believe "request" is everything requested from your server, including graphics, files, etc, and "page request" refers to just the html page itself, so the numbers will always be heavily skewed towards "request".
Then my traffic has been even below what I thought it was. I'm going to need to do some serious overhauling of strategy.
Have your stats always been turned on, Dan, or did you just turned it on recently? Because if it's recently, you should give it time to collect data (a week at least to get any semblance of a true pattern). It hasn't been collecting data until you turned it on, so that might have skewed your numbers...
As far as I can tell, it's been running since the site ran - it has stats since March, when I started it.