You also understand web site traffic?

So you look at the traffic reports but you're confused. What is he saying when he says he has had 6 visitors and 574 hits? Understanding traffic numbers can be confusing if you do not understand the meaning of those technical terms. Once you get the basics down the statistics will be much easier to read and understand.

The first thing you need is a good stat counter installed on your website. There are many hosting providers that will give you an already installed. If you find that does not give you the information you need, you want to find what works. Most of the statistical counters are easy to install and only requires you to copy and paste HTML code. A counter that is based on the host will give you statistics for your site directly to your site, while with an external counter will need to visit another site. In this site you can set up various projects for each of your websites or blogs to monitor the statistics for them.

Now, with a counter stats good place for your website you need to figure out what all those graphs and numbers mean. To understand the numbers you really need to understand the terminology. Once you grasp the terminology you can dig up and analyze the numbers.

Hits are the number of specific items that were loaded in a browser. So if you have 15 objects on a page of your site with an HTML file that contains 16 hits every time a visitor looks at that page. An object on a page could be a painting, a widget, a text box or a small graphic. On any given web page you will find different items and in some cases hundreds or objects. The real thing to remember is that shots are not an indication of the actual number of visitors your site received.

A visitor is registered for your site when a person visits and receives a cookie that marks them as a visitor. The cookie allows the site to be identified as a new visitor or returning visitor to distinguish them from unique visitors. If the visitor's computer is using does not allow for cookies to trace them, will be recorded as a unique visitor every time they visit.

Visits define how many times visitors have come to your website. These include the unique visitors and returning visitors to obtain a total. For this reason, the number of visits is usually higher than the number of visitors, especially when you have a site with content that is updated frequently.

The difference between page views and visits a page view registers the page as a whole. A view of a page that might have 20 different objects would still only count as one page view. At the same time, the page count as 20 hits every time it is viewed by a visitor.

A reference page or the site lets you know where your traffic is coming. It is useful to know how visitors are finding your site. They are from a search engine or signature that link in your favorite forum? Knowing this information tells you what promotion technique is working.

The entry page stat counter provides will tell you which pages your visitors land when they arrive. Most think of visitors always arriving on the home page, but not always the case. Search engines index the pages within the site, so if the search engine believes that the internal page is more relevant to a particular search result could return to send visitors directly to that article or page. When you know where visitors arrive on site you can make adjustments accordingly.

The exit page is the page that visitors leave the site. This can you tell if you are rapidly going out when they see the order page and may need to make some changes. If you make changes to the pages that visitors usually come out you can keep them on the site longer.

Now that you understand a few terms, we can better understand web traffic. Knowing how, when and where visitors are arriving and departing from your website will help you customize your site to make it more targeted, efficient and useful. In the long run, this is what will allow you to gain more traffic and conversions as a result .......