One Huge Mistake

As most of you know, I’m honest about the way I approach this site and how I promote it. I’m also honest about how I’m no expert and I also think it’s important to say that I know I’m a dumb ass, but I’m here and my site is ranking really well after only 8 weeks. My alexa ranking for one month is putting me at 86,000 out of all the websites in the world.

I have also admitted I don’t fully understand SEO, although I am reading everything I can get my hands on to give my self a greater understanding in order to push this site forward. There are a lot of things I don’t fully understand yet, we all start somewhere right?

The mistake I am refering to, is to do with my stats. I have talked about the stat plugin I use which is ChikunCount which works in my WordPress dashboard and gives me real time stats, hits and unique visitors. There in lies the problem. Let me explain;

Chuck left a message on my post Secret to a 40,000 hit launch (post removed for reasons below) basically he was finding it hard to believe the amount of traffic I was talking about and could he see my Google analytics screen shot. I replied saying I didn’t use it and I couldn’t explain why he had a higer page rank than me if I was doing the traffic I was talking about.

Chuck then, rightly so in my opinion, thought I was lying about my stats and self inflating the site, to which he wrote a post about. Now it got quite heated for an hour or two and it could of gone one of two ways.

I could of ignored the problem and carried on regardless, this would have been disastrous in my opinion, Chuck is a well respected professional in this industry, been at it a long time and runs a well written blog about blogging with a journalistic angle. I’m honest about everything I do on this site,  how I promote it and how I’m dedicated to helping others achieve the ranking I have with Alexa in such a short space of time. Because of this honesty I decided to meet the problem head on, something which a lot of site owners would never do.

I emailed, tweeted and replied to his post. Chuck being the expert in this field, I asked his advice, I knew I was giving the stats I was seeing in my dashboard, but could it be wrong? Well yes I think it was.

If you look at the screen grab from my dashboard you will see it says 156,142 hits for my first 8 weeks and 5,079 unique visitors. Now the term we are looking at is hits.

I now know that a ‘hit’ is a file that is sent to a web browser on a page load. For example if you have a few images or files on one page, every time that page is viewed it could result in 3, 4 or 100 hits, just for one actually page view.

Was this a stupid mistake? Well yes it was, but I would like to take a minute how I came to the conclusion of my traffic being 40,000 hits a month (which actually it was, but it was hits and not page views)

I look at my site in a few different other sites, mainly alexa. My average page views to reader ratio according to alexa averages about 20 for last month. Also on a website called scoreinthebox it gave information about my site (1 month out of date now) that I was receiving just over 5,300 page views a day, which led me to conclude my stats on my dashboard were correct, after all I was getting a stack of comments and re-tweets, so no reason to question it.

So what am I doing about it?

Well I have taken down a couple of post that referred to the misleading information, although it was 40,000 hits, a hit is not a page view, which could confuse others. I’m also now taking a great deal of time to learn about SEO and reader use on the site by installing Google Analytics (installed this afternoon). I’ll post January’s stats from GA at the end of the month (something which I will make public at the end of every month). As I said I’m no expert, I’m going back to school to make sure what people read on this site is the best quality they can possible get.

I’m also going to do a post about the myths behind hits and page views to stop others falling into this trap.

So why the post, have I been pressured into this?

Hell no and hopefully Chuck will agree, that this post is off my own back, purely to help others understand the relationship between hits, page views and unique visitors etc. It’s important to me to be honest in everything I do as a website owner and more importantly as a father. If you make a mistake own up to it, people will respect that and some will learn from it.

So there you have it, although I have been thinking a hit was a page view, the site has had an incredible month. Although I can’t be hugely accurate on this months traffic figures I can break down what I have done this month;

Since the December 1st;

• 310 comments on my posts, Combined figure of readers and myself.
• 60 posts
• Alexa Ranking for this month (1 Month average) 86,093

All in all a busy month and an important one. I’ll take the lesson I learnt this morning forward with me into 2010 and hopefully educate others that may be viewing their website in the same way.

Ultimately this has been an important day for me and this post will hopefully show that by being honest with your readers and facing up to the fact you maybe wrong will ultimately make you a better website owner and a better person.

So what does everyone think? Crazy for posting this?

Please Comment

Please Re-tweet, Digg and StumbleUpon and show the world how one person can make a mistake and turn that into a positive situation.