Tracking Your Visitors Once You Start Blogging

Most new bloggers want to know one things - how many visitors they have have today. This is not unusual, and you can easily track this information and more. While there are a lot of different ways to track visitors on your blog or website, some of them are better than others. Some of the best have one thing in common - they are free.

You can actually accomplish one other important step by taking the following route, which will not only get you started in tracking visitors, but also push your blog closer to the top of search engine results pages.

• Start off by going to SiteMeter and signing up for an account. SiteMeter is an extremely useful tool for tracking the number of visitors that come to your site. You can also view the entry pages (which page they "landed" on when they first got to your site), exit pages (which page they were on when they left your site), and many more details about your visitors. You can even predict the growth of your traffic based on previous daily, weekly, and monthly stats.
• Visit Ping-O-Matic for an easy route to both of the above goals.
• You'll see a list of sites to "ping" (which basically tells the site that you have updated your blog recently, and to check for changes.). Among the listed choices are IceRocket, Technorati. Sign up for both of these websites - both of them will show you information about your visitors, and who's linking to your site.
• AFTER you have signed up for as many of the sites on Ping-O-Matic that apply to your blog, and submitted your blog - head back to the Ping-O-Matic website. Enter your blog information (don't worry if you don't yet have an RSS or Atom feed, you can leave that blank). Then check mark all of the boxes next to the sites you submitted to earlier, scroll down, and press "Send Pings". Repeat the ping each time you update your site, or set a time each week or month to do this. It is an important part of letting the search engines know that you keep your site up to date, and where readers can find you!

Don't neglect to keep writing fresh content on your blog - it can be really distracting on the web at times, and you don't want to forget your overall goals!