SEO is key for all blogs to succeed.

Although part of SEO is seeing when and where bots visit your blog.

Crawl Track has the fix.

Crawl Track allows you to watch visitors, hacking attempts, and bot visits.

The software is free but does need to be manually installed in your MySQL server.

Here is how to set it up.

(You need a server with php 4.3 or higher, GD2 graphic library to see the graphs, and 1 MySQL database).

1. Download the software.
2. Upload it to your server.
3. Create a new MySQL database for crawl track.
4. Visit the location of crawl track on your server (usually /crawltrack/ or what ever folder you put it in).
5. Select your language.
6. Enter your database info.
7. Create an admin account.
8. Create a website tag.
9. Insert your website tag into your WordPress theme (appearance –> editor). Remember it needs the tags.
10. Then you can see all search engine bots. (all 4,000 of them).
11. You can also see what your visitors visited, and if anyone attempted to hack your blog.
12. If you want you can set your stats to be public but remember in your robots.txt to blacklist the crawltrack folder since there is over 10,000 links.

Note: This is for self hosted blogs/websites that have access to .php. WordPress.com/blogger/etc do not have access to .php (or mysql). While you can use it on non-php (html based) software (say media wiki,or phpbb forums) you will need access to your .htaccess files.

I use the software every day to monitor how many search engine pings I get, along with visitors, and hacking attempts.

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