Creating Your Website Presence

Getting traffic or visitors to your web site is one thing, however, you need to understand how they got there in the first and without analyzing your traffic, you wont be able to improve upon the overall results.

Within your Hosting Control Panel, there should be a Web Stats Programme such as Webalizer. Web Stat Programmes use various terms to describe web site traffic and it’s visitors.  It is important to understand what the terms are and how they relate to your website in particular.

Visits – these are requests made by a specific user to the website during a specific period of time, normally 24 hours.  Users are identified by cookies, username or hostnames/ip addresses.

Hit – this is a request to the server for a file not a page. Your page can be made up of different files, such as graphic files, audio files or javascript files etc, resulting in a number of hits for that page. Each of these requests is called a hit.

Counting hits is not the same as tracking pageviews. It takes multiple hits to view a page. You may at times see website owners sprouting that they receive 1 000 000 hits to their website, so come and advertrise on our site. Hits are not the same as individual users and a site receiving 1 000 000 hits is certainly not receiving 1 000 000 unique visitors.

Pageview / Impressions – this is the number of times a page is accessed completely.

Unique View – A page view by a unique person within a 24 hour period.

Referrer – A page that links to your site. By looking at your referrers will tell you who’s linked to your website or more importantly what page are they linking to. This is of particular value, because you can determine where your search engine traffic is originating.

User Agent – This refers to the software used to access your site.  Sometimes known as a “browser” or “client”, the term user agent can describe a PHP script, a browser like Internet Explorer, or a search engine spider like GoogleBot.

We trust you have found this of benefit and should you require additional information or assistance please do not hesitate to contact us accordingly.

Until Next Time …
Happy Blogging

SEO Steve
Hosting Impact – Australian Small Business Hosting