Success through Traffic Analysis by Richard Vanderhurst

One of the most significant facets of Site management is traffic research. If you do not know where your visitors are coming from - and in what numbers - you cannot effectively push your website, or gauge the outcome of any current promotion efforts. Checking the stats for your site should be a daily activity, and if you are not doing it already, now's the time to start. There's some perplexity as to the different terms used to explain Site traffic. Misuse of these terms frequently causes miscommunication, so it is important that you know the correct words and ideas.

"Hit" is commonly used to clarify an impression, and that is inaccurate. If you use frames, then one precise page view may end up in multiple hits, as multiple files comprise that one page. On each request your webserver records another entry in its log files, so when log research programs read these files, they will report total hits. Folk regularly think this is total page perspectives and they get excited pointlessly - don't fall into the same trap. If you use frames, you must only count impressions on your principal content pages, not those on the pages you use for your menu or header frames.

An alternative way to take a look at this is to only count impressions on pages that display advertising.

A page view by a peerless person inside a 24 hour period.
This doesn't have to be a truthful to goodness page : it would, for instance, be the result set of a search engine. Having a look at your referrers will tell you who's linked to your website This refers back to the software used to access your internet site. Regularly known as a "browser" or "client", the term user agent can describe a PHP script, a browser like Web Explorer, or a search engine spider like GoogleBot. If you can identify what software is getting used to access your web site, you'll be ready to determine if users are abusing it, and when the search engines last crawled your pages. Early in the life of the Web, counters were reasonably favored. A counter is an easy script that records the amount of visitors to a site in a text file or database and then shows the total, either textually or graphically, on the web site. You can make a choice from 3 main types of tracking software - let us have a look at your options. Without regard for their simplicity of use, this sort of service is the worst, for a variety of reasons. Constantly it is inaccurate : as the traffic recording relies on a connection to a remote server ( a server that's likely bogged down ), plenty of your visitors would potentially not be recorded because requests simply time out. Also, remote trackers continually need you to set a button or graphic on your internet site for the free use of their service, which isn't wonderful for most site owners. So try avoiding using these services unless you do not have the capacity or experience to execute tracking scripts of any type on your own server.

About Richard Vanderhurst

For over ten years, Richard Vanderhurst has been on the cutting edge of cyber technology developing hardware and software for Internet based applications. His recent accomplishment includes understanding search engine algorithm and engineering test beds for further evaluation.