A lot of us web gurus seem to know how to walk the web walk fairly well, but do we know how to walk and talk? And more importantly, do we even understand the talk?

With the explosion of the web it seems we are constantly running across new words for anything web related, and new web definitions for ordinary terms. Think Google “spiders” or “spam”, which used to be the mystery behind mystery “meat” Mondays if you grew up “digital” in school. In today’s online environment, there are quite a few things you can find more common than spam—they are the misunderstood internet terms people use everyday without realizing their true meaning. Miscommunication this slight could be the reason why you think your website is more productive than it really is.

The most frequent term used when marketers and advertisers talk about website traffic reports are “hits” or “web requests”. When asking clients how positively they think their website is performing, we usually receive the “we got over three hundred thousand hits just the other day, so I think we’re receiving a lot of traffic” response, when in fact it is likely a smaller percentage of hits that actually represent the number of visits.

“Hits” is the word many people confuse with website “visits”, when what they really are, is the number of files requested when a user visits or loads a page. These files include images, HTML, JavaScript or cascading style sheets. Since one page load is not the same as one hit, then it is an inaccurate measure of the number of website visits or traffic.

“Page Views” can just as easily be misconstrued. Like hits, marketers often tangle this term up with the number of website visitors and traffic whereby it really represents the number of times a page is viewed once or more than once by the same or a number of individuals. Hosting, HTML, Bandwidth, Browser, Directory and other terms like these listed in your web stats report are simple examples which can be clarified by visiting Wikipedia or WebWeavers (http://www.webweavers.co.za/glos.html) and without requiring an Internet Terminology for Dummies handbook. However, other commonly misunderstood terms and initialisms like DNS, FTP, SSL, Ghosting, Mapping, and Mount are probably best left to your AOR, IT person, graphic designer or website specialist.

If learning a second language isn’t quite your thing, companies like Web Trends specialize in tracking your website activity and provides traffic reports written in English, sometimes with definitions provided. We at Henderson Robb provide all types of website services, including the creation or redesign of them—always with a service that provides detailed traffic reports which we can assist in interpreting. We also provide outsource services to companies like Web Trends at request.

We respectfully recommend you either get educated or get an outsourced company, but in any event learn the major terms so not only will you increase your web vocabulary, but you’ll be able to read your website traffic reports correctly and help you to truly gauge how many people are visiting your site and specific pages/sections. This knowledge can further help you to promote the most popular service based on the most popular pages, for example, and ultimately bring in business leads and revenue you thought never existed.