UPDATE 19 August 2008: This post was prepared before the introduction of New Blogger and is meant for those using old classic Blogger template. For New Blogger xml template, please refer to adding advertisements and hit counter to New Blogger blog.
Many bloggers are interested in knowing how often their blog was viewed. What you need is a hits counter. You can get a free hit counter here at StatCounter.com. After you sign up for an account, you will be taken through a series of steps to generate codes to paste into your template. You will have to provide a title and give the url of your blog, choose a category and select from a series of options. You may just accept the default if you want a counter similar to what you see at the bottom of this page (you may also select the invisible option). There will be just one option where no default is given and that is whether your website uses frames. Select NO. There is a further option of whether you want the script generated for your counter to be XHTML compliant or not. For the New Blogger, I have earlier found that leaving this unticked can give a working counter. But if you are using a New Blogger template, it is probably betting to tick that option. When the codes are generated, highlight it and copy the codes.
Sign into Dashboard, select the relevant blog, click the TEMPLATE tab to get to the template editor to edit the template. Paste the codes after the tag and before the tag. If you chose an invisible counter, you can follow the instruction in the post exactly, and it doesn’t matter whether you are using the old classic template or the New Blogger template. If you chose a visible counter, the counter will appear at the bottom of the page. If you want the visible counter to appear elsewhere and you are using the old classic Blogger template, you will have to refer to this post Blogger template tutorial (old classic template): Adding stuff via the template for a guide as to where to paste the script.
If you chose an invisible counter, the number of steps is very much less. Note that Statcounter have changed a bit since this post was written and I think I need to do an update/redit or a new post,
For New Blogger template, see update.