Webmasters have access to so much information about their visitors these days, and it’s amazing to see how far we’ve come. About a decade ago, those of us who were running independent Web sites were excited just to have hit counters displayed that showed how many people were visiting our sites. These days you can discover incredible details about where your visitors are coming from in the world, what they’re looking at, how they’re interacting with your Web site, and what they were searching for that led them to you. With that knowledge, webmasters can optimize their online creations to the extreme. If you don’t know anything about the people that are visiting your space on the Web, then you need to check out W3Counter.

If you can paste a small piece of code into your Web site, then you can use W3Counter. I love looking at the information that W3Counter provides, and it’s quite easy to become addicted to constantly examining this data. The service even provides widgets that you can embed to show your visitors some of your stats. A free version of the service is available, however, if you have over 5,000 daily page views and want access to some more features, you’ll need a Pro account.