Log file analysis is very important in sucess of website,

Log file information provides a baseline of statistics that indicate use levels and support use and/or growth comparisons among parts of a site or over time. Such analysis also provides some technical information regarding server load, unusual activity, or unsuccessful requests, and can assist in marketing and site development and management activities. Server log file analysis is also an important part of search engine optimization, it also helps in determining the best keyword that converts and best keyword mostly used,


What's in a Log File
Every communication between a client's browser and a Web server results in an entry in the server's log recording the transaction.

In general, a log file entry contains:
the address of the computer requesting the file
the date and time of the request
the URL for the file requestedthe protocol used for the request the size of the file requested
the referring URLthe browser and operating system used by the requesting computer.

What Can You Learn From a Log File?

Data available from a log file can be compiled and combined in various ways, providing statistics or listings such as:

total files and kilobytes successfully served
number of requests by type of file, such as HTML page views
distinct IP addresses served and the number of requests each made
number of requests by domain suffix (derived from IP addresses)
number of requests by HTTP status codes (successful, failed, redirected, informational)
totals and averages by specific time periods (hours, days, weeks, months, years)
URLs from which user came to the site browsers and versions making the requests.
number of requests made ("hits")
number of requests for specific files or directories

How good are log files?

We should be able to differentiate between hits, page view and unique visitors, not all hits and page views are visitors, there are good free tools for seperating the data that way, some are funnel web analyser, awstats, webalizer etc,

For more information on tracking and logging visit this forum thread, Tracking and Logging http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum39/

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