Many people talk about "hits" when measuring how busy their website is, but this is a very technical measure. It actually refers to how many files have been requested from the server to make up all of the pages that have been viewed over a period of time.

Visitors is a much more useful measure from an organisation's perspective as it refers to how many people have visited a web site over a period of time.

There are a few key things to look for when measuring how many visitors you have.

How many of the visits to a web site are unique visits? In other words, do people visit your web site once and then never return or do you have 100,000 visits each month made by only 1000 different visitors.

How many pages do they look at on your web site?

Whether these figures are a good thing or a bad thing will depend on the type of site you have.

A web site for a sports club would expect a lot more return visits (because it has loyal supporter who check information such as scores) than a holiday cottage rental site.

This is a very general term used by web designers and web marketers to refer to how findable your web site is by using a search engine.

More specifically, you would look at your visibility in relation to specific search terms that will help bring people to your web site.

Another slightly derogatory term used to refer to software or web projects that never materialise.