BLOGGING TIPS
If you’re using Movable Type or another program that uses multiple pages to store your blog, be sure to put your visitor counter(s) on every page.
Every now and again, I notice new blogs or ones that have recently moved off of BlogSpot where the only counter is on the main page. This will fail to count any visitors who come over directly to a permalink to a specific post which, if others are linking you, should be a substantial part of your traffic.
Update: Don Sensing just reminded me of another: Put the code for your SiteMeter outside of your table. (Mine is centered at the very bottom of the page.) Doing that will allow the rest of your site to load. Indeed, it’s best to do that with any outside scripts, like your blogrolling.com powered blogrolls. Kevin Aylward gives some technical explanation here.
Guilty. Thanks!
What a coincidence. I just did this yesterday.
If on MT, put the Sitemeter code in the Archive template, rather than ‘by hand’ in each post.
Has Sitemeter been down for a couple hours tonight?
Yes–definitely in the template itself!
And SiteMeter apparently operates on nodes or something. Mine has been perfectly fine all day but wonky several days this week. Don Sensing’s has been down most of the day, though–which prompted the post.
Or, if you’re lucky enough to have a visit counter on your hosting account, use that and get all the visits to your (sub)domain in one place, without bogging down with a request to a third party.
WR: Yeah, I do that too and it’s certainly more accurate. The advantages to SiteMeter, though, are 1) it includes the period when I was on BlogSpot and 2) it’s widely used and thus gives me a basis for comparison to other blogs’ traffic.