SEO Warrior

Popular Web Stats Tools

Many different free and paid web stats tools are available. Table 6-3 shows some of the best known web stats tools, along with their pros and cons.

Table 6-3. Popular web stats tools

Tool	Pros	Cons
Webtrends (http://www.webtrends.com) Price: $10,000+	Powerful analytics package Offers everything other tools offer, and more	Expensive Difficult for novice users
Analog (http://www.analog.cx) Price: Free	Solid offering Popular	Everything shown on a single HTML file
WebLog Expert (http://www.weblogexpert.com) Price: $74.95–$124.95	Elegant interface and graphics Different report styles (.html, .pdf, etc.) Relatively inexpensive	Does not have features of high-end tools
AWStats (http://awstats.sourceforge.net) Price: Free	Professional-looking interface Popular Written in Perl	Could have some additional graphs found in paid tools
Webalizer (http://www.webalizer.com) Price: Free	Fast, written in C Simple interface Straight-to-the-point approach	Takes some time to get used to stacked metric diagrams Could have some additional graphs found in AWStats

Webalizer and AWStats are readily available on a plethora of shared hosting providers, whereas WebLog Expert is the notable inexpensive alternative to Webtrends and other commercial offerings.

You can use any web stats package as long as it can give you the information you need to do your SEO. At a minimum, you need to be able to get the following types of metrics to have a good picture of how your website is doing:

• Number of visitors

• Unique visitors

• Number ...