StatCounter is a free service that tracks the number of hits your website receives. It records a wealth of information about your visitors, including the type of browser they use, their screen resolution, and their geographic location. It can also tell you whether the user came to your website from a search engine, showing you the exact search query that the user entered.
Adding the tracking script to your site
After creating a StatCounter account, click the "Add Project" link in the menubar at the top of the screen. Fill in all the information and select "Invisible tracking" for the counter type on the right side of the page. This option will make the counter invisible to visitors of your webpage. I use this option because it makes my website look more professional.
It then brings you to a page that contains a long list of different installation instructions for a variety of platforms, frameworks, blogs, and hosting services. Choose the one that best fits your particular setup. If you have a plain, "vanilla" website that doesn't really use anything extra, then click the "Default Installation Guide" link on the right. That's what I'll be doing.
The next page displays the code that you'll need to add to your website. The code inside the "Standard" tab is the best overall choice. If you're a stickler for writing websites in well-formed XHTML, use the code in the "Standard (xhtml)" tab. If you don't want to use Javascript on your website, use the code in the "Basic" tab. And if you want your code to be both XHTML-compliant and Javascript-free, use the code in the "Basic (xhtml)" tab. Note that the "Basic" versions do not record as much information about the visitor. Javascript has to be used in order to get certain information, like screen resolution and geographic location.
I'm going to use the "Standard" code. Copy and paste the code right before the </body> tag on your website. By placing the code here, the StatCounter script won't run until the entire page is loaded. If it were to be placed "higher up" in the HTML, like in the <head> tag, then the rest of the page wouldn't load until the StatCounter script finishes downloading and executing. Sometimes, this can take a few seconds, so it's best to put the script at the end of the page so it doesn't keep the rest of the page from loading.
Once you've added the code to your website, you can check to make sure it works by clicking the "Check Installation" button at the bottom of the installation guide page.
Creating a blocking cookie
Lastly, you're going to want to add a blocking cookie to your computer. This cookie will prevent your own visits to your website from being tracked so that the project statistics aren't skewed by your own activity. Go to the main "Projects" page and then click the "Blocking Cookie" link in the menu bar at the top of the screen. Then, click the "Create Blocking Cookie" button. This will create a blocking cookie that applies to all of your StatCounter projects.
Remember that if you have multiple browsers on your computer, you'll have to do this for each browser, because each browser has its own set of cookies.
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