A visitor hit counter or sometimes called stat counter is a good tool for the analysis of visitors in your website. Using hit counter, you`ll be able to determine the following from your visitors,

1. Of course, the number of visitors that came into your website both unique, new and those who came back again.

2. Search engine referrers and keywords. It will tell you which search engine gives you the most and the least traffic and the keyword in your website that makes your web page top in the search engine.

3. The traffic details in hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis. This is to determine which particular time you got the most and least visitors.

4. The type of browser and screen resolution of the computer of your visitors. This is important for website designing purposes, to determine what kind of design best suite to the most number of your visitors.

5. The country where of the location of your visitor, and more.

There are a lot of free hit counters available in the internet to choose from. You can choose whether you want or you don’t want to host the database of the hit counter. The common among and the disavantage of using a free hit counter is that, they put a live link from your website to there website. If you are conscious about your page rank, this live link will reduce its value. The following are some of the hit counters that I had tested,

1. Statcounter from statcounter.com - can be set as invisible but the link still remains. It looks good but this could result a penalty from search engines because an invisible link is some kind of spam.

2. Sitemeter from counterstat.com

3. Freelogs from freelogs.com - A very simple log and doesn’t have reporting of visitor details

On the other hand, the following provide free PHP hit counter scripts.

1. Phpmyvisites from phpmyvisites.net - A very good PHP hit counter script with a comprehensive reporting and nice layout. The only problem here is that its supports are written in French plus, it is hard to modify the code to remove the automatically generated live link.

2. Level Ten Hot counter from leveltendesign.com - another nice Free PHP hit counter. The code is easy to understand and modify. Reporting is contained in a flash format. The only problem I see here is that it does not determine the IP address of the visitors.

Those are only some of so many available free hit counter and free PHP hit counter script in the internet. Feel free to discover your own.