Anyone who has ever built a web page has one thing that they want to know once they upload it; how many visits am I getting? In this tutorial, I am going to show you how to add a counter to your web page, for free of course.

The counter that I am using is from SiteMeter.com. There are a number of different counters available. SiteMeter offers the following: A web counter that is fast and easy to setup, real-time reports on the visitor activity of your web site, and weekly email reports on your sites traffic. All free of charge.

The first step is setting up an account. This is a very painless process and takes less than five minutes. (There are three pages of information that they require. A total of about 10 Questions you have to answer.)

Now that you have completed the sign up process, you are ready to paste the code into your page. This is another area where SiteMeter really shines. They provide you with instructions for a number of different web publishing applications (here are the applications; FrontPage and FrontPage Express, FrontPage 2000/2002, Dreamweaver, Publisher 2000, Claris Home Page, Adobe PageMill, Netscape Gold or Netscape Composer, NetObjects, Trellix, Adobe GoLive, ixla Web Easy, Using NotePad or another HTML editor).

Select your application (I chose Adobe GoLive) and you are given step-by-step instructions on how to paste the code into your web page. Here are the instructions for GoLive:

| *Adobe’s GoLive Installation Instructions
These are the instructions for adding a Site Meter web counter and tracker to your site using Adobe’s GoLive.

  1. Select the HTML code in the box (below) with your mouse.

  2. Copy it to the clipboard. (Press the CTRL key and the letter C at the same time.)

  3. Open your page in Adobe GoLive 4.0.

  4. Click on the ‘Source’ tab.

  5. Paste all of your counter code between the <body> and </body> tags. Right before the </body> tag at the bottom of the page is usually a good place. (Press the CTRL key and the letter V at the same time to paste from the clipboard.)

  6. Click the ‘Preview’ tab to view the result and then save the page.
    Note: Do not attempt to move the counter in any other mode (such as Layout) after inserting the code. Doing so will alter the counter code and produce script errors on the page when it is viewed in a browser.

  7. You can now publish your page to your web server.*  
       

That’s all there is to adding the counter to your web page. Note: For the most accurate statistics, Site Meter recommends that you paste that code into everypage of your site.

SiteMeter offers a number of different counter styles (examples to the left) and then allows you to customize those further. You can also specify the number that you would like to start your counter at, have the counter ignore visits from your current IP address (to get more accurate results by not counting yourself), specify how often you would like to get counter reports in your email, and set the level of privacy of your site statistics.

Another great thing, besides the ease of use and the ability to customize the counter, is the statistics. When you log-in to your statistics you get an overview of recent activity. To the left of the site summary you have a real gold mine when it comes to statistics. Here are some of the stat’s available: summary, who’s on (visitors in the last 20 minutes), traffic prediction, recent visitors by details, referrals, search words, by entry pages, exit pages, day, week, month, year and on and on.

If you are at all interested in what people are looking at on your site, then I would highly recommend you add a SiteMeter counter to your web site.

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