You really want to analyze your source of traffic. Most of the times you install, use some of the free softwares available on the net. But If you are a programmer… You will want to know how to track these visitors, Search engine keywords, etc…

Here I’ll be showing the programmer’s point of view to develop a solution.

To track most of the important aspects of search engine referals, are the HTTP_REFERER and the HTTP_USER_AGENT variables.

I’m assuming you have Apache as the web server and PHP as the scripting language with my favourite MySQL as the database server.

There are two ways that you can track the above content

• Apache access logs
• Database logging

Keyword Hits
So the final result would be like

Search Engine Referers
Search Engine hit counts

In this tutorial, I’ll be focussing on the MySQL logging. So lets begin with it.