What is a Blog Counter?

A blog counter is a useful tool for bloggers, helping the blogger gain information about people who visit a site. At first glance, it seems the counter only gives information about how many people visit a site. Many of these counters are actually much more functional and may give readouts on the specific pages visited, country location of visitors, and amount of time a person spends on the site. This information might help improve or customize a blog so that it better appeals to visitors.

Most people will notice a blog counter on the front page of a site, and it has a number showing count of people who have visited. In the early days of site traffic, this may not stand as an advertisement about the popularity of a page unless traffic increases quickly. There may be some detriment to a blog counter that only shows a couple hundred visitors, and where the number of visitors doesn’t increase much over time. Of course this tells the blogger he needs to expand efforts to increase traffic, but it also communicates to visitors that the page is not popular.

One potential remedy to this scenario is to use an invisible blog counter. Until numbers rise into the thousands, the invisible counter can be a useful tool for the blogger only. He or she can check the numbers to see if traffic is increasing, without conveying to visitors that traffic is still sluggish.

There are fortunately many ways to obtain blog counters freely. As mentioned, some of these counters give bloggers access to lots of information about their visitors. Alternately, simple counters are available too. Some of the things people should look for when installing a blog counter include free service, tracking of visits to all parts of the site, and graphics that are in line with page design.

Another way to approach getting a blog counter on a page is to create one. While many web hosting or blog hosting companies offer free ones, people can also easily learn the code to make their own. This may be a good idea for those who want to customize a blog as much as possible. With more advanced programming knowledge, it’s possible to program in a variety of report features, but this takes a little work for the amateur programmer.

Any type of blog counter that offers reporting features on visitors is only useful if people utilize reports to make improvements in pages. For example, if a person notices that a blog typically draws in readers from Germany, he might put more information about Germany on the site or consider translating the site to German. Alternately, he could strive for a wider audience by adding additional, more universally appealing, topics. Ultimately, the blog counter is only as good as the blogger’s response to it, and the smart blogger will pay attention to what counters reveal about a site.