You're not being very clear so I am going to try an answer your question as best as I can

If you are trying to put a counter on a webpage, I wouldn't. Counters have not been "in style" for a long time and IMO look "amateurish" on a page.

If you want to track visitors for reporting. Cookies have a couple of problems (well truthfully all methods of tracking visitors have problems, but that's a different problem). Cookies can be turned off or cookies can be deleted before expiration. You also have to write special handling to track visitors by cookies.

I would recommend getting a logfile analysis program to get visitor counts. They should give you a reasonable unique visitor count (based on IP). Of course this has a couple of flaws. Several people behind a NAT'd firewall will show up as 1 visitor and people who don't have static IP's (dial-up users will generally get a new IP every time and Cable users will get a new IP every month or so).

Check out AWStats or Analog, both are good