How important is your Website? Is it for business or pleasure? If it's for business, on a scale of one to ten, how important is it to your bottom line? Chances are pretty good that if you found this site in a search, you're looking to improve your Website, your bottom line, or both. If you're looking for Web analytics information, then you are serious about your Website.

Web traffic is the amount of data sent and received by visitors to a web site. It is a large portion of Internet traffic. This is determined by the number of visitors and the number of pages they visit. Sites monitor the incoming and outgoing traffic to see which parts or pages of their site are popular and if there are any apparent trends, such as one specific page being viewed mostly by people in a particular country. Search engines are not the only source of visitors. A comprehensive marketing program can involve obtaining links from other sites, as well as PPC (Pay Per Click) programs such as Google Adwords. A good traffic statistics package provides information about all of these referral sources.

Until recently, most people had no idea that there was a way for the non-tech site owner to get deep data on their Website activity, and the few who knew about the log files desperately wanted to have the reports available without paying for log file analysis. There are many ways to monitor this traffic and the gathered data is used to help structure sites, highlight security problems or indicate a potential lack of bandwidth – not all web traffic is welcome.

Web statistics are an important part of search engine optimization (SEO). As part of Search Engine Marketing (SEM), SEO requires the support of software programs that track web traffic. Web traffic can be analyzed by viewing the traffic statistics found in the web server log file, an automatically-generated list of all the pages served. A hit is generated when any file is served. The page itself is considered a file, but images are also files, thus a page with 5 images could generate 6 hits (the 5 images and the page itself). A page view is generated when a visitor requests any page within the web site – a visitor will always generate at least one page view (the main page) but could generate many more.

Adjustments to 'keywords' and keyword phrases can then be implemented to target and increase visits. A similar strategy also applies to the text in links from other sites. A targeted approach to search engines is essential if increasing numbers of searchers are going to be referred to your web site or individual web pages. A high ranking for the 'improved' site will increase web traffic.