Web counters are almost useless.
If you want to know who's visiting your site, get web hosting that provides proper web stats, i.e. logs the time and IP address of every page fetch and provides tools for displaying some sort of analysis, so you can see which files/pages get the most hits, who the most frequent visitors are (often turns out to be search engines :-/) what country they come from and no. of hits per day/week/month/whatever. It will also give you referer information, and if the referer was a search engine like Google it will tell you what search terms they used. If you can bother to study it carefully, this can be useful.

Even then the data is apt to be misleading. You have no idea how many are viewing your pages via a cache or proxy that gives that a recent copy without touching your actual web server and thus without incrementing your counter or making a log entry.

Put a counter on your page if you like. But don't expect the number to mean anything.