Starting a Business | SEO & Google

SEO Resources

As with all industries the world of websites is peppered with its own lingo. Get to know it well and nobody will be able to pull the wool over your avatar.

Hits

The most abused and wrongly used statistic referring to web activity. You've heard people say 'I get 100,000 hits a month!' Meaningless. A hit refers to each file sent by the server to a web browser - therefore, if you have a page that contains seven images, chances are those images plus the HTML file supporting them will register as eight hits. The numbers get quickly out of hand and you've no real idea how many visitors your site is getting.

Page views

A more accurate measurable, because the figure disregards how many hits or files make up the web page. It simply measures how many times a web page was served up. The problem with pageviews is that you don't know whether it was one user looking at twenty pages or twenty visitors looking at one page each...

Visitors/uniques

This should be the number that you are paying most attention to. This is the truest representation of how popular your site is. More accurate than hits or page views, your visitor numbers show how many people actually came to your site.

PPC

Price Per Click is the financial reward someone will pay you for every click they receive from an advert placed on your site - or the price you pay Google, for example, every time someone clicks on your AdWords advert. Clients often ask what a good PPC rate is and the answer is that it depends. It's only worth what someone is prepared to pay.

PPM

This is less and less common nowadays but some advertisers don't want to be messing around with a micro-payment for every single click-through. They're looking at this relationship in the macro sense and expect you to be sending over shedloads of visitors. They therefore prefer to work in terms of thousands of visitors rather than anything smaller. The letter M is the Latin representation of 1000, and thus PPM is the Price Per Thousand.

Here's an idea for you

I'm assuming that you've already signed up to Google Analytics and the information is flooding through, but don't just rely on these statistics, get a second opinion. Now, maybe your developer has bolted on a website statistics function to your site, but if not check out www.opentracker.com, which is a great tool for measuring activity and, if you're considering marketing your site on search engines other than Google, essential.


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