What does Website Traffic mean in SEO?

This is a term to explain how many visits a website receives and is generally measured in a variety of ways.

As unique visitors - how many genuine individual people are visiting the website. So if a person visits a website in the morning and then goes back to it again in the afternoon that site is still said to have had only 'one unique visitor'.

As page views - the number of pages viewed. If a person visits the site and looks at three pages before leaving then the page has had 'one unique visitor and three page views'

As hits - this measures the number of times a file is requested from the server. If a user visits a website with two images then they will have requested three files (the page and the two images) so this website will have had three hits.

As visitors - this is slightly different from unique visitors (above) as it counts visits. So if a person goes to a website in the morning and then goes back to it in the afternoon this is 'two visits but one unique visitor'.

Note 'unique visitor' is an assumption because the website does not recognise a person but their computer. So if you visit a website in the morning and then your son visits the same website in the evening then internet software assumes you and your son are one and the same person as you are using the same computer. As such both 'visitors' and 'unique visitors' have the ability to be misleading.