Is there anyone out there who can, or knows of some company who can;

1. Advise on statistics on websites ie monthly hits, demograpghics etc

2. Advise on optimisation of site.

Many thanks.

supercounters.com -I use one of their widgets on my sites and it tells me everything I need to know.

Visits - total, highest, times, average, daily, weekly, monthly

Browsers used, operating systems used

Countries

Referrers

Who is on-line, last 50 users complete with map

and more

and it's free!

Hope that helps.

Mark, who is based in the Ensure Insurance office in Cheung Mon, has a lot of experience with optimizing websites to ensure maximum hits etc

There are a number of services for statistics, free in thin version as up to the last 100 users and 12 month (1 year) back stats; as paid subscription typically with larger database. I use to use sitemeter.com, but they have seen to be not that stable after MySpace bought them some years back, so the suggested supercounters.com may be worth taking a look at.

On your web-server you are supposed to have at least one very detailed statistic program. If you use a Linux/Unix based Apache server, your administration panel, for example cPanel, will show you the stats apps available and how to access them and generate various reports.

Site optimization may be depending of what target your site has. search engine optimization – especially Google – is mainly up to the content of your meta-tags with title, description and keywords; your robots.txt-file and sitemap-file, and preferably a Google webmaster account. Some link share or other sites linking to your site may help. You can supplement with buying keyword-based ads, at for example at Google.

Other optimization will normally be dependant on the site’s target; for some sites you can generate (huge) traffic from social media like FaceBook – and also your various share buttons and OG:-tags and similar in metafiles are important. AddThis.com is a good option for share-buttons, free for a beginning and also available as a pro subscription; they provide a fairly detailed stat for hits. Some sites’ content may be better off with link-share or like arrangements with other sites having similar type of content.

Also a dedicated page on Facebook – or account other social media – can generate traffic, but you need some (genuine) “likes” and “followers” to get it going and growing; the time phase needed for this is depending on your sites content. Facebook provides a good stat for you page content; i.e. likes, clicks, viral, and shares.

A number of companies offer various optimization services, typically search engine optimization, but be aware, some of them do nothing more than generating an invoice and cash your money.

Hope this can be at your help, and wish you good luck with you web-project.

OP, is it your own website that you want statistics on, or someone else's?

If it's your own, then Google Analytics is very good (and includes a lot of features for free). http://www.google.com/analytics/

If someone else's and the site is sufficiently popular, then Alexa has some very basic information for free. http://www.alexa.com/