"Hits" is a term that's a hangover from the early days of the web, when visitor statistics were primitive compared to the sophisticated data collection tools available today. It's really not uncommon to see websites receives thousands of hits in a short period of time, but it's not a meaningful metric to most professionals in web analytics.
A hit is nothing more than a web server request, and since an HTML page can contain multiple images, media, CSS files and other resources that are assembled by the client browser, a single trip to a webpage can easily result in dozens of hits. Every time one of these resources is served, the hit counter will the incremented. Furthermore, if the visitor then hits the refresh button, all the items that are reloaded will be counted as hits again.
Given the number of web crawlers and search engine spiders visiting a site, a "hit" doesn't differentiate between a piece of software trawling your site and a human visitor. Most website owners are really trying to count the number of unique visitors and unique page views, and a hit count doesn't provide any useful information to provide context to the number.
The simple way to collect meaningful statistics is to use Google Analytics, which is free to use and simple to install. All of the visitor data is collected and processed by their servers, and the application parses this information to provide a detailed view of:
- Unique visitors: the number of people looking at your site, excluding page refreshes and non-human traffic (like bots).
- Unique page views: how many pages each visitor viewed.
- Bounce rate: the percentage of visitors who left after viewing only one page on your site.
- Location: mapping the IP address of the visitor to show the geographic hot-spots of your traffic.
Visitor numbers are important and a hit count is extremely misleading. If you're interested in studying your site traffic, the visitor information can provide significantly more data.
James Beswick is the author of "Ranking #1: 50 Essential Tips to Boost Your Search Engine Results" available on Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1452849900?ie=UTF8&ref_=sr_1_1&s=books&qid=1279571154&sr=1-1&linkCode=shr&camp=213733&creative=393177&tag=ekcy-20.
For more information, visit http://ranking-number1.com.
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