Top Ten Pansitan.Net Subdomains

Pansitan.net enjoys very good web stats. Above, you can see the top ten most visited subdomains in the community. I guess, one of the reasons we get a lot of visitors is because of the variety of entries we offer our readers. The above statistics are ranked based on number of visitors. (Based on January 2008 webalizer)

If you maintain a website, and have a site counter tool installed on your site, you probably enjoy looking at your numbers growing month by month (depending if you diligently refresh your contents to entice your guests to come back). But what do those measures really mean? Here’s a bit of explanation for each of them:

Hits -A hit counts each file on a page. Look at a page on your site. Including the html file your visitor is looking at, a hit also counts if you have images, sound files, or whatever else you have on that page that’s being called. So if you have 2 images, 1 mp3 file streaming, 1 video file; a javascript exec, then a visit to this page would give you a total of 6. If you really think about it, a hit doesn’t really mean anything if you want to know how much traffic you get on your site.

Requests - Also called a “page request” or “page” , a request is basically the same as a hit.

Visitor - A visitor is one IP (internet protocol, each computer that connects to the internet has its own IP) that goes to your site in a 30-min period. So if this same visitor comes back to your site after 30 minutes, she would be counted as a different visitor.

Unique Visitor - Much like a visitor, but with a unique visitor, your visitor’s IP is just counted once.

Page View – Page views show you a count of the number of pages looked at, not counting the graphic or whatever else file you have on your page.

There’s a lot of things you can learn from your statistics. Altho they may not be taken as the “end all and be all” since there might be some other factors involved like page caching and visitors who go thru a router to go to the internet but there still are some useful information that can teach you how to improve your site’s popularity and “reader-reach”. Also together with your stats, you might also want to know how your visitors found your site and which pages they go to and which they don’t look at.

Basically, when you study your website stats, consider your number of visitors, the pages they frequent, what link/site referred them to your site, and what are the normal keywords they used that landed them to your site. Site referrers could be your ad campaigns, or if you own a blog, a reciprocal link or search engine referral. Keywords are a very invaluable source of information for you. Your website counter will actually tell you which keywords you used you scored high on. Using these keywords you could try to optimize on those words a lot.

Another thing that you’d also like to look at is your daily visits per day. For Pansitan.net, the days with the highest visits among the members happen every Mondays and Wednesdays, with Tuesdays and Thursdays close seconds. The least day we get visitors is on Sunday (2 out of 25 websites). Knowing the day of the week your visitors come more often, would at least give you an insight on when you should normally update your site. If they come most often on a Tuesday, have your entry up and running by Monday night. This would at least give you a chance to set your visitors’ visiting habits to your site.

So how do you increase web traffic to your site?  That’s something we’ll be talking about next time… For now, do visit our sites in the community and be entertained no end with what we offer you