Let’s start with “hits”. This is possibly the most misunderstood word that website owners freely throw around. You’ve probably heard the following dozens of times. “My website got over half a million hits last month”. “My site got over a million hits per month!” So while your competitor or best friend is trying to brag about how many “hits” his website is getting, what does this word really mean and why should you snicker after hearing this?

To answer this question, let’s use Wikipedia’s definition to define what a “hit” is:

Hit – A request for a file from the web server. Available only in log analysis.

What does this really mean?

When you visit any page in a website, the page you land on counts as one hit. In fact, every page you click on and go to counts as a “hit”. However, web pages are made up of several elements including graphics and most web pages have several graphics on them. When you land on a page, not only is your visit to this page considered a hit, but each image that loads on that page is also considered a “hit”.

Let’s say that you actually had 1,000 individuals visit your website last month. This would translate to 1,000 hits plus many more hits. Each page, that each person visits, adds additional hits to this number. And each image and other pieces of content that loads on each page further inflates the number of hits.

So when someone says that they received one million hits to their website, this could potentially mean that they only received 1,000-10,000 individual visitors to their website (not one million individual visitors to their website).

Unique visitors, on the other hand, means individual visitors to your website. If I visit a website 5 times within a month, then I will be counted as one unique visitor who has visited the website once within a month.

So if someone says that they are receiving one million unique visitors per month, then they are receiving quite a lot of visitors.

Some people view “hits” statistics as “misleading” and not important when analyzing traffic to a website. I personally disagree with this. There is a direct correlation between the number of hits and what people are doing within your site. An increase in the number of hits can mean that people are spending more time within your website. Getting people to spend more time within your website is an excellent achievement and something we all strive for.

1.) Hire a consultant to assess your website.
Instead of looking at your website and thinking about what you would like to do this year and possibly what you need to do, bring in an expert who can professionally assess your website and tell you where you need to make changes. As no two consultants will give you the exact same feedback, it’s a good idea to hire two consultants if you can afford to. If spending money on a consultant is not in the budget, or possibly you are a hands on person that feels that they can make changes that affect their website, proceed to the next steps. What will a professional assessment of your website cost? A flat $200 if you hire Websites for Jewelers. This includes a written formal proposal.

2.) Add Google Analytics to your website.
Google analytics will help you to determine important information with regards to who is visiting your website, whether they went directly to your website or used a search engine, if they used Google to find your website, which search term(s) they used, and so much more. How do you add Google Analytics to your website? If you don’t already have a Google account, go to www.google.com, click on the “sign in” link in the upper right corner, and then click the “Create an account now” link in the lower right corner. Once you create your account, Google makes several tools available to you including setting up your Google Analytics account.

3.) See where you stand in the search engines.
There are excellent programs that you can purchase and download to check this. If you want to get a very basic overview of where your website’s rankings in the major search engines, this is an excellent site to visit: http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/ranking-reports/.

4.) Check your page title and Meta descriptions.
If you’re like most companies, you hired a web design firm to build your website. Unless the design firm specifically included an SEO (search engine optimization) package in the design of your website, the pages in your website may or may not have individual page titles and Meta descriptions. How do you check this? Go to all pages in your website (or at least a handful). In Internet Explorer, go to the top Internet Explorer and look for the link that reads “Page” and then “View Source”. When you click “View Source”, you will see the text that makes up your page. At the very top of the page you should see two things:
<title> </title>
<meta name="description" content=" ">

The information that appears with both of these should be unique. If you do not see unique text in the “title” tag, you will need to have unique text added to each page. If you do not see unique text added to the “meta description” tag, once again, you will need to have unique text added to each page.

5.) Make sure you have access to your website’s statistics and access this at least once a month.
Almost all websites have some type of website statistics program associated with it. Typically, your “hosting company” provides a link to this program so that you can check to see what’s going on in your website. These programs tell you, on a month by month basis, how many hits you had to your site, very importantly how many unique visitors visited your site, if your visitors used a search engine to find your site, which search engine did they use and which search term(s) did they use, and so much more. If nothing else, it’s important that you check your stats once a month to learn how many unique visitors are going to your website. This will tell you whether traffic to your website is going up, down or staying the same.

6.) Check for broken links, bad pages, and other issues in your website.
Even after you pay a web design firm to create a website, it’s always possible for there to be broken links, bad pages and other issues in your website. To check these things for yourself, you can use one of the many free tools available via other websites. Here is one tool that will quickly check for any web pages in your site that have problems: http://www.iwebtool.com/broken_link_checker. Please note that you should also try to use other tools as the site above does not check each page in depth for any problems.

7.) Look through your site for out of date content.This could include things as simple as the copyright date in the footer. It’s the new year and it’s time to update that copyright. More importantly, look through all pages in your site and see what information is no longer valid. Maybe you have added new manufacturers/designers to your line. Maybe you are no longer working with some manufacturers/designers. Check your “about us” page and see if the information is still valid. Possibly during this last year you were forced to lay off some people and you have a photo showing the people you laid off. It’s probably a good idea to place a new image there.

8.) Check the items (jewelry) you are showing and/or selling.
Have you kept the jewelry in your website up to date? Are you still showing items that were sold during last year? Take the time to go through your site to see which items are being displayed and make any adjustments that are necessary.

9.) Get into the habit of changing up the items that are pictured and featured on your home page.
No one likes to look at the same storefront every day. If you do not have a set of programming in your website that rotates the featured items on your home page, it’s very important for you to make sure that these items get manually updated on a regular basis. Show potential customers that you have new and exciting products to showcase.

10.) Give your website a fresh new look.
Retail stores need to change the displays in their windows and stores on a regular basis to keep people interested in shopping there. The same is true for websites. Your home page should have updated content on a regular basis so that people come back to it. At the very least, you should be updating text on your home page and tell people about what’s new and interesting. If you can, it’s always a great idea to change up the design of your website once a year. If you haven’t updated the look of your website for two years, it’s important that you make a commitment to giving your site a new look.