Web site hits?

[William]

Joel and I are pretty happy the way things are going , Just wondering if these stats are OK , Asking others with websites I guess www.liquidboulevard.com This is our 4th week of operation , We are Emailing daily to (As of today) 91 people per day and going , @ 2.00 pm today we had had 800 hits today , And have had just on 10.000 hits since Jan 16th , Just wondering , We put plenty of time and effort in , Bill & Joel Thanks all for your support

[TonySlattery]

You are doing well, considering how many new sites are being created every day. I am not an expert in these matters by any measure, in fact I have to admit to being a baby boomer, so all this new fangled technology is a bit beyond me.

I have a website hosted with SiteBuildIt, and now I am getting more than 300 hits per day without doing much by way of adding content.

[Kerrie]

Just a word on " hits"

There is a difference between measuring ' hits' versus unique visitors.

Each ' hit' registers regardless of whether it is one person 200 times or 200 different people going to the site.

Ask your website person about that difference. It can mean you look at the marketing side of the site a little differently.

Ive sold for fair fax f2. Network and google resellers and learnt a bit about it all. It's all about having the site found where your audience is - easily.

Congrats too btw

[www shanecorderoy com]

I think your doing a great job of your website, please give me some tips on improving mine. I just signed o for your mailing list. I think that is a great idea I might add a photo a day mailing list to my site.

[I @ M]

please give me some tips on improving mine.

Spend 20 hours a day taking unique high quality images that have not been taken before.

[Kym]

You also need to separate 'bots (googlebot, Yahoo slurp, Bingbot etc) from your stats.
Further, there are bad 'bots that just waste bandwidth, the worst being Baidu from China that ignores robots.txt (that tell what can/cannot be indexed)

AP has implemented a .htaccess control that nearly halved our bandwidth by blocking the bad 'bots.
I.e. wasted hits we don't want.

#security
<Files .htaccess>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</Files>

#error processing
ErrorDocument 400 /err/400.shtml
ErrorDocument 401 /err/401.shtml
ErrorDocument 403 /err/403.shtml
ErrorDocument 404 /err/404.shtml
ErrorDocument 500 /err/500.shtml

#rewrite rules
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^ausphotography.net.au$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ "http\:\/\/www\.ausphotography\.net\.au\/$1" [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^(aesop_com_spiderman|alexibot|backweb|baidu|bandit|batchftp|bigfoot) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^(black.?hole|blackwidow|blowfish|botalot|buddy|builtbottough|bullseye) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^(cheesebot|cherrypicker|chinaclaw|collector|copier|copyrightcheck) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^(cosmos|crescent|curl|custo|da|diibot|disco|dittospyder|dragonfly) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^(drip|easydl|ebingbong|ecatch|eirgrabber|emailcollector|emailsiphon) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^(emailwolf|erocrawler|exabot|eyenetie|filehound|flashget|flunky) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^(frontpage|getright|getweb|go.?zilla|go-ahead-got-it|gotit|grabnet) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^(grafula|harvest|hloader|hmview|httplib|httrack|humanlinks|ilsebot) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^(infonavirobot|infotekies|intelliseek|interget|iria|jennybot|jetcar) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^(joc|justview|jyxobot|kenjin|keyword|larbin|leechftp|lexibot|lftp|libweb) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^(likse|linkscan|linkwalker|lnspiderguy|lwp|magnet|mag-net|markwatch) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^(mata.?hari|memo|microsoft.?url|midown.?tool|miixpc|mirror|missigua) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^(mister.?pix|moget|mozilla.?newt|nameprotect|navroad|backdoorbot|nearsite) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^(net.?vampire|netants|netcraft|netmechanic|netspider|nextgensearchbot) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^(attach|nicerspro|nimblecrawler|npbot|octopus|offline.?explorer) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^(offline.?navigator|openfind|outfoxbot|pagegrabber|papa|pavuk) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^(pcbrowser|php.?version.?tracker|pockey|propowerbot|prowebwalker) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^(psbot|pump|queryn|recorder|realdownload|reaper|reget|true_robot) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^(repomonkey|rma|internetseer|sitesnagger|siphon|slysearch|smartdownload) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^(snake|snapbot|snoopy|sogou|spacebison|spankbot|spanner|sqworm|superbot) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^(superhttp|surfbot|asterias|suzuran|szukacz|takeout|teleport) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^(telesoft|the.?intraformant|thenomad|tighttwatbot|titan|urldispatcher) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^(turingos|turnitinbot|urly.?warning|vacuum|vci|voideye|whacker) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^(libwww-perl|widow|wisenutbot|wwwoffle|xaldon|xenu|zeus|zyborg|anonymouse) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^web(zip|emaile|enhancer|fetch|go.?is|auto|bandit|clip|copier|master|reaper|sauger|site.?quester|whack) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*(baidu|collector|craftbot|download|extract|grabber|leacher|spinn3r|stripper|sucker|ninja|clshttp|webpictures|webspider|yandex).*$ [NC]
RewriteRule . - [F,L]
#

[Redgum]

Hits on websites is much like saying "I saw 800 people today". In itself the statistic has no value other than to website developers who would like you to use their services to upgrade your site.
From a marketing perspective, when you convert those "hits" into tangible sales or inquiries you can make the judgement that your website is "working". This is not a lot different to the days when you circulated brochures to prospective clients and measured the results by the number of people that actually called you (read email or telephone).
The other benefit of a good website is "branding". People/clients will get to know your company/services (information) and use it at the appropriate time but you need to survey your clients to determine how they found you otherwise it's guesswork. Most important of all is not to rely on your product alone to sell itself. Good information and promotional text is essential.

[ricktas]

You should also be able to get a breakdown of the hits, into unique visitors, country, etc

For example.

Ausphotography for February (so far)

16,119 unique visitors
35,390 visits (unique visitors have averaged 2.19 visits)
716,766 pages visited (20.25 pages viewed per visit on average)
2,981,082 hits

You should also be able to see which pages on your site are the most visited etc, which can be handy, for knowing what people are looking for/at, and help with marketing etc.

Even what search terms people used to find your site (if they used a search engine). For AP, photography is the top searched term, followed by Canon, Australia, Nikon, Sigma..in that order.

Your stats can be used to tell a lot about the people looking at your site, and thus allow you to plan/adjust your site to suit what people want, or try and find out why certain areas of the site are not looked at much, and what you can do remedy that.

But as Redgum says, the only true way to find out is ask those visiting your site, what they like / don't like, etc.

[camerasnoop]

Some info I found useful for my site is contained in the links below. I found that blocking access to all IP addresses from China, Korea, India, Pakistan, and Brazil reduced my SPAM to "bugger all". I have a couple of other countries on that list too that you might not want to include like Canada and Mexico (penis enlargement and drugs). one word of warning though. It makes your .htaccess file large and that will slow it down for your intended customers.

<a href="http://www.thesitewizard.com/apache/block-bots-with-htaccess.shtml" target="_top">How to Block Unwanted Bots from Your Website with .htaccess</a>

http://www.wizcrafts.net/nigerian-blocklist.html

Hope you find this useful. I got sick of having my email addresses scraped and then obliterated by SPAMMERS. Hanging is too good for those bastards.

****EDIT****

I forgot to add that there is a company based in San Diego called WEBSENSE which is also a wise inclusion on the banned IP list you put in your .htaccess file.

[William]

Thanks for the useful info guys , I'm back thanks to Bigpong I've been without internet for 3 days , Appreciate your feedback , Joel and I are still learning , As you do !!

[junqbox]

Not sure if you're using the service already, but Google Analytics is a great measurement tool for drilling down through the stats to identify the bits that are working and which aren't. Only requires a small script pasted into the code for each page on the site.