There are two or three ways to obtain information about how your site is doing, which pages are popular, who is visiting, what browsers they're using and who is sending them to your site. Gathering this information depends on the layout of your site, and your hosting company.

The most common measurement used is the page hit counter, which can usually be added in several ways, the most common of which is to obtain a free counter from another website that gives them out. The way this works is that the visual image (location/filename) of the counter in most cases, is loaded into your page along with the rest of the document and the request for that file by your visitor is recorded as a hit to your page and added to the count. More sophisticated counter sytems of this sort also check to see where this request came from, and will ignore repeated ones from the same user because they are not 'unique'. Sometimes they will also record these reloads on a reports page. This function also probably exists on your server itself, and in much more detail.

Server statistics programs are used on almost all servers, they record who, what time and what files were downloaded from the server and can usually be set to generate a report of your site's individual statistics, publishing it into your directory as a plain HTML report page. If your host cannot supply you with one, you can have your own cgi sript installed on the server to do this for you. Often you can access these counters with links in your webpages and show the counter on your page if you like. Server based reports are the best, because they automatically record all file use on the site.

More sophisticated counters are also available for free over the web that will record very detailed information, gleaned from visitors browsers with javascripts that check such things as the browser type and version, screen resolution, color depth, referrer, and keywords used in search engines to find your site! This referrer information is invaluable, since it allows you to see which other websites have links to your site on their pages. It is also helpful to see the results that your keywords are generating so you can tailor them or choose new ones to reach your target audience.

One of the best free statistics counters is offered by eXTReMe.