Search engine optimization is about achieving visible positions in search engine results, because this visibility is directly linked to the amount of traffic your website attracts. If you’re serious about your web presence, you’ll want to know who’s visiting your site, and measure this traffic over time. Website Analytics programs generate statistical reports that show how people find and use your website, often including information such as the number of visitors per month or the number of visitors who returned to the site again (repeat visitors, suggesting members of your regular web audience).

There are several different analytics programs available,
many of which are free. See the website analytics section of the SEO resources page for a few suggestions.

Some website analytics reports use different terminology to mean the same thing. All the different terms can be confusing if you’re new to web analytics or don’t know what to look for. The following definitions will help you understand the terminology in your website analytics reports:

Hits – Every time a file is accessed from your website a “hit” is logged to the server.

For example, a single visitor to your site could pull up several pages of your site. Each of these pages could have multiple images, accounting for a hundred hits or more. Hits should generally be ignored as a measure of your site’s traffic, since they don't correspond clearly to the number of pages viewed or the number of visitors (one user viewing one website page can count as one hit or a hundred, depending on how your pages are constructed!). A more accurate view of how many people are seeing your site comes from visits and unique visitors.

Visits – Each time someone comes to your website counts as a visit, regardless of how many pages they view. If the same person leaves your site and comes back later that day, week or month, it is counted as a new visit. Also called a Session or Visitor Session.

Unique Visitors/Visits – The number of unique individuals that visited your site over a specified period of time (usually monthly). A useful measure of the number of people you're reaching. You should note that a visitor who accesses your website from two different computers (or one computer and one cell phone) would be considered two unique visitors, so this number may be slightly inaccurate.

Repeat/Reload Visitors – A repeat visitor is a one who accesses your website more than once in a given time frame. The number of repeat visitors can indicate whether your website is considered a source of fresh, relevant content, since a high number suggests that website users have reasons to return to the site frequently. Websites with highly active blogs, user discussion forums, and other interactive forms of communication tend to have large numbers of repeat visitors.

Page Views – This indicates how many individual web pages were viewed. You can also see how many times each particular page was viewed to see which parts of your site are most popular. It is also helpful to track the average number of pages viewed a visit to measure how interesting viewers find your site; if the average visitor views only one page and leaves, you may have a problem. If this isn’t listed in your analytics package, you can calculate it yourself by comparing the total number of page views to the total number of visits; if the numbers are fairly close, then most of your users aren’t viewing multiple pages of content on your site.

Referrer – Site where the visitor came from, or which site they clicked from to get to your website, often one of the major search engines. Also known as the referring source or referral.

Keywords – List of keywords that were searched on to find your site. Helpful in analyzing the effectiveness of your search engine optimization efforts, since you can immediately determine which keywords are bringing traffic into your site.

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