What is a log: briefly about the main

In addition to the standard site statistics, which includes the number of unique visitors, open pages and lots of other useful information, the webmaster must know many more other things about such a site, and this is what the logs reveal to him. In this novice webmasters often do not even know what a log is and what it gives.

What information is needed?

As mentioned above, in addition to the standard parameters, the site owner must know a lot of other data:

• Which pages are the most visited.
• What search queries users are more likely to get to the site.
• Which browsers or operating systems are the most in demand among visitors.
• Which screen resolution is used by visitors most often.
• And much more.

How to find out?

In the majority of cases, a paid or free counter is installed on the sites, while the resource that provides it, performs a thorough analysis of the site and maintains visitor statistics, which you can read at any time. Especially the use of such meters is in demand in the event that a person places their own site on a free hosting. When considering what a log is, it is important to learn how to work with such counters, since, in fact, they include most of the necessary data.

Most of the hosters providing paid hosting initially give their customers the opportunity to use the analysis tools that are already installed in the created site. For example, Apache servers use a specialized utility called Webalizer, which is used as an additional server module.

Those who use paid hosting can also completely independently process all data regarding their site, since a webmaster who knows what a site log is and how to use it has full access to all the necessary information.

What is it?

On any site is its own log, in which the webmaster can look at any convenient moment. What is a log? This is a separate text file, which contains information regarding all requests to the site, as well as regarding various errors related to these requests.

How is the data written to the log?

Initially, the user types in the browser's own address of a specific site and goes to it. After that, the user's browser starts sending to the server on which the site is located a request for issuing the web page of interest to the user. Along with this, the server is provided with the following information:

• IP-address of the visitor.
• The exact time of the request.
• The browser that the user is using.
• The operating system that the user is using.
• The page that interests him.
• The address of the page from which the transition was made to the target.

After that, the visitor is given a request by the server, and all information regarding the transaction is made in the event log, creating a so-called log file.

A competent analysis of the logs allows the webmaster to determine exactly how his resource is used and in what direction it is more relevant to develop.

What information do the logs provide?

By browsing the site's logs, you can find a huge amount of useful information that will improve the further promotion of the resource and make it more efficient:

• Attendance . Of course, this indicator is determined by the standard counter, which can be present on each page, but in the log these data are provided in more detail, including attendance by days, hours or months. Also, through the use of logs, it is possible to determine the hours of a spike or the silence of attendance, which is extremely important to know when doing site maintenance.
• Traffic . In this case, it provides both the traffic of each individual page, and the total traffic of the site for a certain period of time.
• Conversion. This parameter allows you to determine how the visitors are navigating through your resource, that is, they viewed one page and closed it, or they nevertheless began to "travel" through your site, looking through one page after another. The level of conversion allows you to indirectly determine the quality of your site.
• Abandoned pages. Considering what server logs are, you can often determine that there are abandoned pages in them, that is, those that are visited extremely rarely. In this situation, the webmaster should conduct a thorough analysis of the situation, because it may be that the pages have ceased to interest people or they have become difficult to find among the many others on your site.
• Popular pages. Web pages that are most visited. You can use them as a sample in the process of creating other pages, and if necessary, you can also direct users from these pages to some other ones that are abandoned or less popular.
• Search requests. Among other things, the site logs also have the effectiveness of those meta tags, keywords and the very names of web pages that you used and on which your site could find some search engines. Accordingly, the logs contain data about which search engine the search engine found your site for.