Blog Traffic
It is important for blogs, particularly smaller blogs to understand the traffic patterns of their readers, who is visiting and where are they coming from. There are several tools to track and understand this data.

Sitemeter
"Site Meter's comprehensive real time website tracking and counter tools give you instant access to vital information and data about your sites audience. With our detailed reporting you'll have a clear picture of who is visiting your site, how they found you, where they came from, what interests them and much more." (sitemeter.com)

One benefit to this, aside from understanding traffic patterns, is using the 'By Referrals' option to see what sites are referring traffic to your blog. If you have an influx of traffic from another blog it is always good to know why they are sending you traffic and if appropriate reciprocate. Also if you follow the referral links to search engines you can see what people are searching for when they found your blog. This may give you an idea of what kind of information people are looking for.

Basic service at Sitemeter is free. You will be asked to submit the URL for your blog and will be provided with a simple piece of code to include on your site. Afterwards you will have access to unique visitors, page views, referrals, entry and exit pages, geographic locations as well as the domains of visitors. The later is useful particularly to track visits from federal and municipal locations to see what impact your blog is having.

Google Analytics
"Google Analytics is absolutely free! We're very pleased to be able to offer this web analytics solution for no charge, allowing anyone with a website to track conversion data, analyze the flow of visitors through their site, and identify elements of their site that could be changed to improve visitor retention.

This free version is limited to 5 million pageviews a month - however, users with an active Google AdWords account are given unlimited pageview tracking. In addition, Google Analytics is completely integrated into the AdWords front-end and with your AdWords campaign, making it easy to track your AdWords ROI."
Google Analytics
Google Analytics Tour

Google Analytics Primer by Beth Kanter of Beth's Blog
Beth's screencast is a 15 minute video focusing on web analytics for non-profit staffed organizations to understand visitor traffic to their sites. You can jump to 4:50 in the video to get a very in depth introduction to Google Analytics and tips for new users. This is an extremely powerful tool and this video helps a new user get a very basic idea of the possibilities that are available.

HitTail
HitTail.com is a search analysis site. HitTail uses a concept called Long Tail "where the vast majority of statistically less popular items so significantly outweigh the tall head of popular content that there is actually more value to be mined from this "long tail" than the value of the popular items." (downloadsquad.com)

The idea is that the less popular search phrases being used to find your blog/site cumulatively are larger than the sum of the most popular/regular search phrases. HitTail makes repeated notation that they are not an analytic site software, but instead will help you understand what to cover by understanding these lesser searched items in the 'long tail' of your search driven traffic. Registering for HitTail is easy and just requires a username, password, email address and url. You do not need to supply any additional information if you do not desire. After that, there is one line of javascript code you need to place in the body text of your site.


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