When you are starting to finally get a significant number of visitors to your website, you will want to know where and how these people found you. This can be crucial for planning your SEO strategy going forward, as there is a wealth of information stored on your web hosting account, there for the taking, particularly if your web hosting is run by cPanel. There are a number of tracking and stats programs out there, but for now, let’s look at the statistics programs available on cPanel, and what you can find out from them!

There are two powerful statistics programs available on cPanel, and they are AWStats and Webalizer. Each has a wealth of information for you to glean, and use in the optimizations of your business and marketing efforts.

AWStats – AWStats is easily the most comprehensive of the two, giving you information found from much higher octane paid tools. You can get daily and hourly statistics of how many visitors, which of your pages are most popular, latest visitors, which countries they came from, search engine robot visits, browsers, referring websites, keywords used to find your site, links in to your site, and much, much more! AWStats has a very easy to use interface, and a history function that will enable you to compare time periods and trends easily. One of the best things about AWStats is that it is so easy to use, and you can put that knowledge to work right away, and see results from your efforts immediately.

There are many “skins” to dress your page in, so as to make it as comfortable to use as possible. It is also a very good tool to use to keep an eye on bandwidth, indexing and sites that may be up to no good by visiting you.

Webalizer – If you are a more visual learner, Webalizer would be a great place for you to access some of the statistical information about your site. Stats in Webalizer are rendered in a more graphical nature, meaning that what you’re seeing is a snapshot of your site’s traffic stats, without a lot of the detail. It’s good for a quick look, but any in-depth analysis is better left to AWStats or other programs.

There was, until the last update, another choice called Analog, which delivered up detailed stats as well, but it appears to have become a casualty of AWStats popularity, and is no longer available.

There are many other tools out there for the purpose of taking the pulse of your site, among them Google Analytics, which is free and gives you more information than you’ll know what to do with. It requires putting a line of code on your pages that you want tracked, but this is made simple for you.

Putting the power of website statistical analysis to work for you should be a priority for any web business owner out there. The data you can derive from intense scrutiny of your web visitors can be a major aid in helping you better understand how to improve the traffic and performance of your site. Put this on the to-do list today!