When you run a site, getting accurate information and statistics about your sites viewers is very important, and people use a combination of measures such as installing the Google Analytics Program, or using a conter program such as Sitemeter.com. Such information helps them to find out where people are visiting their site from (their users geographic location), which section of the sites are more popular, what are the top referrers that people use to find their site (through search engines, through links on other sites, and so on). I regularly use these programs to ferret out such information and have learned much. As an example:
– I discovered that Google Search is absolutely essential in order to get viewers to your site
– A number of referrers to my sites have been through email programs, which essentially means that people are forwarding the subscription mails they receive when a new post is made, and encourages me to get effective subscription tools in place
– I often get surprised about which posts are most popular, and this helps determine that users think differently from what we expect, and also reinforces the belief that using such analytics tools is a necessary part of running a site
Apart from these tools, I also use another tool for generating information about how popular the site is on several parameters:
– How has the performance of the site been in getting number of users over the last few months (have more people started visiting, vs. have a lower number of people started visiting)
– How many sites link to this site (important for generating a better result in search engine results)
– Identifying keywords (very important in terms of defining which keywords should be emphaized in posts)
So, which is this tool that I use ? It is a site, called siteinfo on Alexa, at the following link : http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo. Suppose you have a site about Indian politics called Indiapoliticalblog.com, and you wanted to find out its result on Alexa, you just need to add the site URL (without the http: //), so that you end up with the following URL: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/indiapoliticalblog.com
