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                 Thanks to fotologic for permission to use this Photo.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has evolved from the elementary days of simple web traffic tips discussed in amateur forums into a sophisticated billion dollar industry in itself over the last decade.  Perhaps Google had something to do with this?  Let me make a quick point about web “traffic”—a more familiar and often misinterpreted term is hits.  I say misinterpreted because of the type of information that the term hit can represent.  You’ve probably come across many sites that use what is commonly referred to as a “hit counter” to track or promote a site’s traffic volume.  More often than not, a hit counter is actually an indication of how many times that particular Web site has been displayed (downloaded) onto someone’s Web browser, and not how many unique user sessions were recorded at the site’s address.  For example, if you go to a Web site whose opening page displays a hit counter, note what number is being shown.  Now click your browser’s “Refresh” or “Reload” button and see what happens to the hit counter’s number.  It probably increased by one digit. 

The same thing will happen if you go down a few levels into the site and click a “Home” hyperlink to redisplay the site’s opening page.  I have also seen a Web site’s usage log files where each recorded “hit” was represented by how many objects were transmitted from the Web server to a user’s computer.  So, if that particular Web page included one HTML file, one background sound bite, eight graphical navigation buttons, a company logo, and one photo image, the number of “hits” being recorded would be a total of ten each time the entire contents of that page were downloaded!  

This is why few people use hit counters or take them seriously, for it is far too easy to manipulate them.  One trick used to exaggerate the number of hits on a site is to add dozens of transparent images throughout blank areas of the site.  Although the web viewer can’t see the images, they quickly register a great number of hits.  Today most people use “unique visitors” as a measurement of a web site’s traffic.  This counter represents the number of unique visitors that have visited the site within a 24-hour period.  Most web hosting companies allow site customers to view a counter log for their site that shows traffic on a daily, monthly and even hourly basis.  These logs will also report how the user arrived at the site, via a search engine or a link on another web site.  If the visitor did find your site using a search engine, it will even list the keywords used on the search engine.  Other statistical information such as the type of browser or computer operating system will also be listed.  A very important stat for e-commerce or e-tailers is the amount of time the user spent on the site.  If people are only spending a minute or two at your retail site, something is wrong and needs to be addressed immediately.

Dean Gottschalk
Web Site Design Instructor
Ashworth University