When a person visits a web site, he would normally send and receive data through his computer.  This amount of data is what constitutes web traffic, which is a large portion of the Internet traffic.  What’s the difference?

Internet traffic is the flow of data in this global system of interconnected computer networks as a whole.  Web traffic, on the other hand, is part of the Internet traffic that is identified by the number of visitors and the pages they visit.

Different sites have varying ways of monitoring traffic to and from their pages, and the data they gather is used to construct better web sites, reinforce security or improve speed by increasing bandwidth.

The web traffic data is also used by advertisers to determine which sites are most viewed by their target audience.  Certain companies offer sections of their sites solely for ads, similar to how it’s done in magazines and newspapers.  This is called display advertising.

In turn, they make their sites more and more popular through web presence—by ensuring these pages are included in search engines.  There are two ways to do this: either by paying for inclusion or placement (called search engine marketing or SEM) or by correcting code and content to improve visibility or literally being on top of the search results list (search engine optimization or SEO).

The theory behind SEMs and SEOs is that we humans tend to pick the first in a long list, or those on top of the heap.  And because it was the user who “searched” for the information, this is more helpful and less annoying as compared to other forms of promoting sites like bulk emails and popup ads.

Unfortunately, other methods have sprung up such as link-farming, keyword-stuffing and article-spinning.  These methods are collective called black hat SEO or spamdexing.  Search engines have been combating these unwanted practices that diminish the significance or search engine result pages (SERPs) and the value of user experience.

Web traffic, or technically the “attractiveness” of web sites and their component pages or sections, is measured by hits & page views.

A hit is the count of the number of times a file is summoned.   The page is considered a file in itself; any other files it contains, such as images or videos, will trigger their own corresponding individual hits.  A page view, on the other hand, is the count of the times a visitor pulls up any page within a site regardless of how many files it contains.

Not all of web traffic is wanted or welcome, though.  There are web attacks and sudden popularity or overnight boom that would cause traffic overload which can delay site access or render it inaccessible (so-called “site is down”).  Putting passwords to limit admission or completely blocking access to specific users are just some of the ways to restrain superfluous traffic.

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