website traffic

There is a lot of shouting about traffic and hits on the internet, especially from the marketing industry. I'm going to dispel a few myths and reveal an underlying element of deceit hidden between some very good schemes.

Traffic is essentially the "amount" of http requests to your server. I have worded that carefully. Hits are the "actual" http requests to your server. 

Every time this page is viewed, providing the viewer does not have it in their browser cache there are 3 "hits" on my server.

1) The HTTP request for the page
2) The HTTP request for the laughing goblin
3) The HTTP requests for the 6 identical pixel images that make up the thin lines. If the user has the browser cache memory switched off then there would be a total of 8 hits.

As you can see, the number of hits to this website is very different to the actual number of page views. Now let us look at the prospect of getting "MEGA TRAFFIC 10,000 HITS JOIN UP TODAY" I'm sure you have seen similar lines to that. Do you think they are going to send you 10,000 visitors or ask you to host a number of files to be automatically accessed or such like?

Even the number of page views is not much to go on. If I wanted to sell advertising space on this site, I could brag about the number of page views in my logs. Of course I could sit here all day with a browser open and repeatedly hit "refresh" or "reload". The real value the ad men need is the amount of "monthly unique page views". That is to say the amount of pages viewed by visitors paying only one page visit per month. If they come back to view the page again, they do not count as they are no longer unique. 

As you can see, the use of the words traffic and hits can be very misleading. Traffic building schemes like webrings on the other hand can be a useful source of qualified prospects. Unfortunately this is a widely known but unwittingly misused scheme. 

A webring consists of a number of websites in a similar industry/topic area. each member site carries hyperlinks to each other members sites. The advent of Search Engines demanding external link citations has tremendously increased the popularity of this scheme.

I said it was widely misused. Here is why. Webrings are traditionally the citation source for smaller websites each containing the same product field or interest thread. a better usage would be a logical progression of members in the same industry that are not in competition with each other. To use the Jelly Bean analogy, there is little point in your Jelly Bean wholesaling site carrying links to a site offering Wine Gums. however carrying links to a soft drinks wholesaler would be beneficial to both parties.

I don't expect the big names to consider running a webring traffic building system because if I want information on a  Ford motor car, i'd just type www.ford.com in my browser. Why would Ford want to get a high ranking in Search engines? I do however expect to see a huge increase in level two and three web sites using the webring system in one protracted form or another.

If you clicked on the Ford link, then you probably have a rather large Cheshire cat grin on your face right now. Congratulations you just discovered that webrings are occasionaly used by the big names, even if they do own a percentage of all the webring members. 
  

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