How do I judge my website statistics?

I own a website and the developer set up my site statistics with Awstats. My main catagories are "unique visitors" "# of visits" "pages" and "hits". The stat that really tracks how many times people are coming to your site is "visits" right? i see several of my competitors sites bragging about their hits, but that isn't a truely accurate picture of how often your site is being visited is it?





Also, I know that one element of search engine rankings is how much traffic your site recieves. Is this ranking from a per day total or from a total traffic total?

How do I judge my website statistics?
%26gt;Also, I know that one element of search engine rankings is how much traffic your site receives. Is this ranking from a per day total or from a total traffic total?





This is a myth! Search engines do not take into account the number of times a site is visited when ranking the search results.





If they did every spammer in the world would have robotic software that simulated human searches and clicked on their sites.





If you want to know what search engines do actually take into account when ranking the search results read through this tutorial http://www.seo-blog.com/tutorial.php





As far as site statistics go 'unique visitors' is only part of the story. What site owners actually need is visitors who 'convert'.





Every website has a purpose, sell a product, sign up for a news letter, fill in a form etc., etc. The ratio of visitors to actions is called the 'conversion ratio' and this is what needs to be maximized.





Google Analytics http://www.google.com/analytics/ is much better than Awstats and allows you to 'tag' goals and measure the conversion rate.





I suggest you sign up for Google Analytics (it's free) and monitor your site's visitors that way.
Reply:Judge your web stats by another parameter - does your website performs well for you? Does it fulfill it aim? Sales? Brand awareness? Info?


If you get leads and in queries about your product consider all your hits as a quality hits, if not - probably you don't know what all this circus is about and better find someone who can lead you.
Reply:Hits really doesn't tell you much: if a web page (not site, just a single page) contains 5 images, each visit to that page will count as 5 (one per image) + 1 (the page) hits. Your competitors may be talking about visits (or not), without knowing the difference.





Actually, the Search Engines do not take into account (to the best of my understanding) traffic. The factors that count are:


-Relevance of your site for the particular keyword/phrase being searched.


-Quantity and quality of links back to your site for that same keyword/phrase.





This is a very broad topic, but in general you can find most of the answers to your analytics-related questions in the book Google Analytics (link below).