There are many ways to measure the activity of a
web site. Vibrant Life employs a sophisticated program called
"Urchin" -- it keeps trace of a very large number of items for
every page and every web. Only a few of those are explained and
shown here.
There are many ways to "measure" a web site and many ways, also, to measure the popularity of that site.
HITS
In the early years you would hear that a web site got a certain number of "hits." That term has some usefulness, but not much. For instance the number of "hits" on one of my web sites, www.oralchelation.com for one day, March 27, 2003, were 30,788.
When you look at a "page" on your computer you see a certain amount of text, and usually images, on the screen. Usually you can also "scroll down" on that page and find more. You may think of that "page" as a "page," but more technically it is a "file."
That file may well have images and other types of "items" and every one of these counts as a hit.
So, as soon as you open up some "page" (actually a file), the statistical program doesn't know how much you looked at, or even whether or not you "scrolled." So, the statistical program measures the file as "one hit" but every image is another "hit," and it would not be unusual for one file (page) to have 2 hits per "file" and another to have 40 hits. The second page would simply have lots of images.
So, web masters can greatly increase the apparent popularity of a web site, if popularity is measured in "hits" by just putting lots of images in that file. Some of those images may be so small that you cannot even see them, but each image still counts as one hit.
This statistic is somewhat useful as long as you don't compare your page with the other guy's page -- as long as you compare your own set of pages on one date with another date.
In general it is not a useful measure of web popularity.
Bytes
The term "byte" is a measurement of memory.
One "page" on a web could have an image that, itself, takes up 100 megabytes of memory (100,000,000 bytes), or it could have an image that takes only 5,000 bytes. You might not even see much difference between the "quality" of the two images.
The number of bytes in a page, multiplied by the number of individual times some person downloaded (or accessed) that page would be the number of total bytes for some period, and for all the pages in a web site, you could get the total number of bytes for all pages.
For the period of one day, March 27, 2003, one web site, www.oralchelation.com, had a total of 466.58 MB of memory usage downloaded to various computers. This term is often called "bandwidth" because it is the "width" of the "band" of stuff that was sent from the server to the various computers that were "looking" at the various pages.
Here is the official Urchin definition of a "byte."
Bytes A byte is a unit of information transferred over a network (or stored on a hard drive or in memory). Every web page, image, or other type of file is composed of some number of bytes. Large files, such as video clips, may be composed of millions of bytes ("megabytes"). Since website and server performance is heavily affected by the amount of bytes transferred, and web hosting providers often charge according to this measure, it is very important for site owners to be aware of and understand. One byte is equal to 8 bits where each bit is either a one or zero. Common terms incorporating the word "byte" are:
- Kilobytes - 1,024 bytes
- Megabyte - 1,048,576 bytes
- Gigabyte - 1,073,741,824 bytes
This is another of those measurements which seldom mean much since they can be affected by a single video clip on a page, but this measurement is good for measuring the same page, or web, from date to date.
Page View
The official Urchin explanation of
"page views" is:
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On March 27, 2003, for www.oralchelation.com, there were 3,988 "page views."
Sessions
Sessions starts to be one of the
measurements that I use in judging the popularity of a web site.
Usually a session is ONE visitor, while he stays on the web site.
When you go to some web site, as you enter that site you have started a "session." As long as you remain on the same web site, no matter how many pages you might visit, that would be ONE session.
More formally, Urchin describes a "session" as follows:
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On March 27, 2003, www.oralchelation.com was shown to have 2,226 "sessions."
This is impressive. It generally means that some 2,000 people, on this one day, have visited this one web site. When I get the same statistic for all 17 web sites, the number is close to 8,000 sessions. This could be one person visiting 6 web sites, or 6 persons each visiting one web -- that type of distinction is not figured.
PAGES
There were 9,483 separate files with "HTM" extensions accounting for all my web sites. It would not be practical to print all of these files on the printer, but I have printed many files. Some files would require well over 100 sheets of paper to print all the text. Very, very few could be printed on one sheet of paper.
For instance, the article I wrote about "cholesterol" prints out at 40 sheets of paper.
I recognize this article as "lengthy." it is certainly NOT the longest article, on one file, that I've written. There are some files where I have put literally hundreds of scientific studies. Each individual study would take two sheets of paper to print, and there are many files with 100 or even 200 separate studies.
On the other hand there are "short" articles. For instance I recently wrote a short article about whether it was "right" or not to use torture in certain situations. That article, when printed, requires 14 sheets of paper -- one file.
Without trying to get more accurate I estimate that my "average" file would require at least 10 pages of paper, 8 1/2 x 11, to print, thus it is safe to estimate that my 17 web sites represent 94,830 separate pages of paper. Since I know that this cannot be exactly exact, that the average number of pages is an estimate, I have rounded the estimate for total number of pages to 95,000 pages.
This could be wrong, of course, but I do not believe it is wrong by much.
I had been doing simple mental calculations and estimated some 22,000 pages, on paper. This day, March 27, 2003, I have what I now think is a far more accurate number -- this 95,000 pages.
The statistic on this page shows that as of March 23, 2003, all webs published by Karl Loren occupied 11.1 GB of disk space per the report below. When I asked technical support about the usage I got a slightly different report.
No matter how you measure these web sites, it is a very, very large amount of information and it attracts a very large number of people, every day.
Source Of Visitors
How does someone "come upon" a web site.
The traditional way of explaining that has been that "search engines" account for almost 100% of the visitors who go to any web site.
You use www.google.com or any of the hundreds of other search engines.
If you enter "Karl Loren," in quote marks, for instance, in Google, as I did on March 27, 2003, you know that you will get links ONLY where both those words are next to one another, and the probability they refer to me, Karl Loren.
I found 4,870 links, or more. You would have to go through these to see how many actually refer to ME, Karl Loren, webmaster, etc.
Many web sites appear impressive but get extremely few daily visitors. In fact there are MILLIONS of web sites that get fewer than a dozen visitors per week -- usually the owner only.
For instance if you use the phrase "heart disease" in
Google, as I just did, you find more than 2,900,000 links. If you
look at any of the top links you will find that they are quite popular.
Goggle ranks web pages partly on the basis of how many people to look.
They have access to those figures. But, if you go to one of the
links that ranked lower than 100, you will find web sites that might get
very, very few visitors per day.
So, for most webmasters they strive hard to make their pages so attractive that the search engines will give them high rankings. The high rankings mean that people searching will find them in the top 10 or so, and that ranking very greatly increases the chance that people will come visit.
So, for many web sites a ranking in the top 10 for any particular search phrase guarantees that they will get lots of visitors, if that search phrase is commonly used.
I have another very sophisticated program with which I keep track of how any of dozens of different search engines rank my various web sites, for specific words or phrases used in the search engine.
For instance, the term "heart disease" is much to broad and my pages are not likely to rank high on that phrase when you take into account the hundreds of thousands of pages where that phrase is included.
But, "oral chelation" is a much more narrow term, and I consider that Vibrant Life is the leading company in the world with information about "oral chelation" and in sales of such a product.
So, when I run this program on the 54 different words and phrases which I consider most central to the web site, as below, I find that I have 15 of these words on two different search engines (Google and AltaVista) where I have the number one ranked position.
The theoretical highest score I could have would be 108 words/phrases in the top ranked position.
But, a more practical measure of popularity is whether or not you are listed in the top 30 ranked web sites. For that purpose I have a score of 84. That means that 84 times one of these 54 words/phrases has been ranked in the top 30 for these two very popular search engines.
I typically see an improvement in rankings from week to week -- probably caused by the fact that I get an increasing number of visitors every week -- probably caused by the fact that these people find stuff they find valuable and either return, or tell their friends.
| First Place Rankings: 15 | Top 5: 51 | Top 10: 62 | Top 20: 77 | Top 30: 84 |
| Moved Up: 14 | Moved Down: 4 | Same: 67 | Total: 85 | Gain/Loss: 10 |
| Keywords: 54 | Engines: 2 | Visibility Score: 1379 | Visibility Percentage: 42.56% |
Here is another important web site published by Karl Loren.
Visibility Statistics |
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| First Place Rankings: 39 | Top 5: 82 | Top 10: 84 | Top 20: 93 | Top 30: 95 |
| Moved Up: 7 | Moved Down: 9 | Same: 79 | Total: 95 | Gain/Loss: -2 |
| Keywords: 42 | Engines: 3 | Visibility Score: 1744 | Visibility Percentage: 46.14% | |
This last report? It means that the program searched for 42 different "keywords", looking at results on three different engines. On these searches Karl's web site had 39 rankings for the top position of all rankings, had 82 rankings in the top 5 and 84 in the top 10. This is probably the best score of any web site in the world that covers this same subject.
That is almost the complete story, but there is a well recognized truth in the marketing business.
Your name (or web site) can become better known, more popular, but advertising, even including magazines, TV, etc.
However, virtually anyone who is regularly involved in
marketing knows that "word-of-mouth" promotion is the very best.
When someone thinks well enough of your product, or web page, or whatever, to tell his friends, you have very, very dedicated people helping you. One personal referral to you, from someone you know, is far more effective than hundreds of dollars spent on advertising.
So, for a web site to get lots of visitors is fine, and to get lots of high rankings on the various search engines? That is fine.
But, when you have a large percentage of return visitors, or visitors who DID NOT use a search engine to find your web (such as would be the case on a personal referral) that is the ultimate of popularity.
On March 23, 2003, I ran one of my programs, using Urchin, and found that a full 26% of all my visitors for a one week period, for www.oralchelation.com, came without "referral" from any search engine.
Generally this is a very high percentage and means that a large number of my daily visitors come because of word-of-mouth promotion or "return visits" where they did not have to go to a search engine to find the web site.
Very few other web sites have such a high percentage of non-search-engine visitors.
When you combine all of these various statistics you find that the 17 web sites for Vibrant Life, all authored by me, Karl Loren, represent a unique success on the planet.
Generally the most popular web sites are those, such as Microsoft, that apply to computer information.
There is a growing number of "retail" web sites, such as www.amazon.com which is one of the most popular.
But, by the time you get to "vitamin" information, or something like "oral chelation," Vibrant Life stands out far, far ahead of anyone else.
We have achieved this status because YOU, the visitor, find the information on these pages to be valuable, and because those of you who purchase our products get good service, and good results, and keep telling others.
Thank you for helping us achieve these fantastic levels of success.
Karl Loren
OralChelation.Com -- Top 20 Pages
OralChelation.Com -- Top Key Words
OralChelation.Com -- Referrals
Number of "Hits" on A Web Page -- OralChelation.com
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You can reach Vibrant Life in many ways, including by mail to Vibrant Life, 2808 N. Naomi St., Burbank, CA 91504. Within the US and Canada, use the toll free number: (800) 523-4521, the local number: (818) 558-1799, the FAX: (818) 558-7299, eMail to kimberly@oralchelation.com or any one of the hundreds of message forms throughout the 50 web sites. Vibrant Life normally ships the same day we get an order. There are message forms on each of the 100,000+ pages on this and other sites where you can communicate with Vibrant Life. Check out our companion site, at: http://www.oralchelation.net where Karl's 2000 page book is published. Karl Loren is the author and webmaster for this BOOK, as well as for another web site about ORAL CHELATION. His personal philosophical articles are at PHILOSOPHY.
Copyright © May 20, 2008 6:24 AM by Karl Loren on behalf of Vibrant Life, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Permission is granted for non-commercial downloading, copying, distribution or redistribution on two conditions: One, that some form of copyright notice is included in every copy distributed or copied, showing the copyright belonging to Vibrant Life, Burbank, CA, at www.oralchelation.com . The second condition is that the material is not to be used for any purpose contrary to the purposes and objectives of this site. This permission does not extend to materials on this site which are copyrighted by others.
