The difference between website hits and website visitors * increase traffic through search engine optimisation techniques by professional website designers

What is a website hit?

First off, we need to establish what a website hit actually is. Then you'll quickly come to see why hits are pretty meaningless and why the number of hits can be manipulated simply by adding more images to your site.

Let's imagine you are surfing the web looking at a particular website. And let's imagine that website has ten pages and that you read each one of those ten pages in turn.

Every time your web browser (e.g. Internet Explorer) requests a file from the web server that hosts the website you are looking at, the web server will register a single hit. When we talk about requesting a file, that might be a file containing some page text, a file containing an image, a piece of JavaScript code, or any other kind of file.

Most web pages are created using more than one file. For example this page you are looking at now will have a file containing the main page text, another file that displays the menu, another file for the logo graphic, a file that contains the smallprint at the foot of the page, and several more besides.

So, when you view an average web page it is likely that your web browser will have to request four or five files from the web server and hence cause the server to register four or five hits.

Now, going back to our imaginary website, suppose that each page is made up of five files. So, when you view the home page, you have caused five website hits to be recorded by the server.

You then go on to view the other nine pages on that website. If they all account for five hits, then that's a total of 50 hits just from one person (i.e. you) visiting that website.

That is why you can easily increase your website hits just by adding more images to each page (because each image is a separate file and therefore an additional hit). And that's why website hits are pretty meaningless when it comes to working out how many people are visiting your site.

After all, if we say that on average one website page will account for five website hits, then a person who says he has had 500 hits on his website today may very well only actually have had 100 people look at his site.

Of course, most website owners aren't deliberately over-exaggerating things - they simply don't realise that there is a difference between website hits and website visits.

To get an accurate picture of how popular your website is, what you need to be concentrating on instead is the number of website visits or number of unique visitors, rather than website hits.

A website visit is recorded each time you go to a particular website. So, in our example from before, if you go to the site and view a page, then that will count as one visit.

If you go back and visit it again tomorrow, that will count as another visit.

So, if you want to get a proper measure of how many people are looking at your web site, and avoid over-exaggerating the popularity of your site, you really need to look at the visitors figure in your web stats rather than the number of hits.

If you are now disappointed by the number of unique visitors your website is actually receiving you are not alone. The majority of websites on the internet get very little traffic. There are a number of reasons that may be causing this:

• Where your website is being hosted and the type of server
  
  
• The design - most websites are not built for the search engines
  
  
• Your website hasn't been correctly optimised
  
  
• It has no inbound links

To increase visitors to your website you have got to be found in the top ten of the search engines for search phrases related to your business. This is where the money is going to be made. The likelihood is you employed a local website designer or even a friend to design your website. What appeared to be a bargain is now most likely looking like a white elephant.

Now you have established the difference between a website hit and visitor you may want to employ a professional website design company to sort your search engine traffic out. You have already discovered how expensive cheap website design really is and are counting the real cost in lost revenue and profits.

The reality is that there are very few website designers of search engine optimisers, despite their claims who can really get results. Try typing these two search phrases into Google -

• Best website designers
• Search engine optimisers

You should find us in the top ten of Google out of more than 80 million web pages for best website designers, and top for best website designers on the internet.

You will also find us in the top ten of Google for search engine optimisers, something other website design companies and search engine optimisers only dream about.

Success on the internet comes at a price. You cannot expect more visitors to your site without employing professional website designers to build an optimised website that is going to achieve high level ranking on Google where you are in competition with millions of other websites.

Any website designer can get you more worthless hits - it's unique visitors you need.