Hey folk's,
I was looking through the Cpanel of a site I am currently having built and Basically trying to make myself familiar with the Cpanel since this is my first site. I came across the web/ftp stat's and decided to take a look. I found 160 "hits" a day for the past few days, and also I saw where the "whois" bot was on of the visitors. Now mind you, the site is not anywhere near complete, is it normal to get visitor's and bot's this early in the game? I am just trying to understand how this will effect my site, and to determine if this is a positive or a negative thing? I was somehow thinking if my site was crawled by a bot before it was complete it could mess up my ranking's because of page's under construction, and page's with little to no content. That is why I have not gone ahead and tried submitting the site to any search engine's.. Anyway was hoping someone could shed some light on the Whois bot, and exactly what that bot means or does, and also tell me what 160 Hits a day means when it is showing I only had 6 unique visitor's. Thanks for all your help so far on this site, and I hope to learn more about what traffic really means and how to understand the effect's it may have on my site.
Chris

On average, a page takes about 25 hits to render. A hit is anything. The html file is a hit, then every image you have on that page, they all live in their own file, so each one is a hit, so is your css, and any js files. 160 hits to 6 visitors isn't very out of line at all.

No web site is ever "complete," and the bots don't know when you might consider one as such. Don't worry, they'll come back after ( and probably before ) you add the rest of your content.

You're not going to submit your site to the search engines, because that would be a waste of your time. Instead, you're going to drop a few links around the web on pages the SE's either know about, or will know about, and they'll follow those links and discover your site. Sounds like the whois bot already did this, which means Google and MSN and Yahoo probably have, too.

It's a good thing, but it's also a fire under your butt telling you to hurry up, if you want to interpret it that way. But with only six people having seen your site, I wouldn't worry much one way or the other. Keep putting it together, and things will work themselves out.

Thanks alot Newbie, That made it very clear! So I do not want to submit to search engine's, let them find me? As far as adding link's either through directories or swapping link's or buying space on a already established site? will having more backlink's etc. get my site crawled by bot's on a more frequent basis? or is this just a periodic thing with no set limit on how and when they crawl my site?

Exactly, let them find you. You can still submit to them if you'd like, but it's 100 % unnecessary. Some people will even go so far as to say it hurts you to submit to the SEs, but that's open to a lot of debate, and there probably isn't any way for someone outside of Google to know for sure. But we do know for a fact if you have links from sites they know about, they'll find yours, and it will work its way into the index.

As far as how to get those links, you have some choices. People will suggest adding a link to your signature ( make sure you give this some thought, and instead of just adding http://mysite.com create targeted anchor text ) to your posts here. That's allowed, and this web site gets respect from Google. You can also submit to a lot of directories. You can also swap links, but this is a bad idea, really not much more helpful than submitting to the SEs. "Recriprical" links, A > B & B > A, aren't worth much, because Google can tell they're quid-pro-quo. They like to see one-way links, which have a better chance of meaning "this site has great content, you should all check it out." The same is true for paid links, except Google doesn't know whether you bought them or not, but they've gotten really good at finding link circles ( A > B > C > D > A ).

I'm not really sure how links affect how often you get crawled. I kind of think in general, more (quality!) links means more frequent crawling. Here, the problem is Big Daddy needs to weigh the pain of having the wrong version of your page cached ( it's bad if they recommend you for a search you're not related to, because you used to be, makes them look bad ) and wasting their bandwidth and computing power on crawling pages that haven't changed. Over time, they'll see how often your site changes, and this will be a factor. But links are a measure of importance on the web, so I think that would tip the scales when it comes to deciding how often to crawl.

If you sign up for Google Webmaster Tools, you can see how often they're crawling you, and while you can't make them come back sooner, you can tell them not to crawl so much. Big sites with a lot of traffic do that to control bandwidth, especially if they don't change very often. But I'd recommend having a look, it will tell you some of how Google sees your site. I think the address is http://google.com/webmasters/tools but I could be wrong.

Thanks alot, I wil ltake a look at that site! Very complex stuff I can see!

Chris I think John's already given you some really good advice, but I'll add a few things and probably repeat a few too.

Hits are really a meaningless stat. A hit is a request to the server and as John pointed out your html page is a hit. So is every image on the page. If you link to an external stylesheet or script it's a hit. So if you create a page with 2 images and 5 people visit that page then you got 15 hits. (5x1html) + (5x2images). If I create a page with 100 images and one person visits I got 101 hits. You can see that they're not really a good measure of traffic.

Look for unique visitors, visits, and page views. There's more, but that's a good start. Also if you're looking at the stats from cPanel use awstats instead of webalyzer. awstats will filter out some bots so it's probably the more accurate of the two.

Search spiders find pages by following links. So the more links pointing to a page on your site the more likely a search spider will visit. So yes having more links pointing to your site should mean your pages get crawled more often. It's not just a schedule thing.

As far as submitting the site to search engines it really doesn't do anything. All it really does is put your site in a queue that search engines may or may not ever look at. The best way to get crawled and indexed is by getting other sites to link to yours.

Adding a link in your forum signature will usually do the trick since forums change frequently and as a result get crawled often.

Where and how to get the links is going to raise a lot of debate. Part of what you want to know is that more isn't always better. Search engines will give more weight to some links than they will to others. The same way if two friends are giving you advice on how sound a purchase in a used car is you'll probably be more likely to trust your friend who's the mechanic rather than your friend who's never driven a car before.

The point is don't just get links from anywhere as tempting as it might seem. Some links won't help you at all and some could potentially hurt you depending on your overall link profile.

Feel free to read a lot of threads here and ask any questions you have. It can be confusing sometimes and more complex than it seems at first, but there are quite a few of us here that will do what we can to help.

Web traffic is the hits or number of users visit your site. If you used statcounter.com , it will categorized as
Returning Visitors - Based purely on a cookie, if this person is returning to your website for another visit an hour or more later
First Time Visitors - Based purely on a cookie, if this person has no cookie then this is considered their first time at your website.
Unique Visitor - Based purely on a cookie, this is the total of the returning visitors and first time visitors - all your visitors.
Page Load - The number of times your page has been visited.