I guess it really depends on your site? I've added many new links and i'm on page 4 now when you do a search for my key words. My page number hits never really seem to go up more than 284 per day. Sometimes a little over 300. Is this good or really really bad. I have no idea what other sites are getting. any insite would be appreciated.
http://www.modernabode.com
spacyjane

like you said it really depends, some sites have tens or hundreds of thousands visitors per day, also log stats can be misleading, by stats prog (awstats) and google analytics and google adsense page impressions all show different stats. To ansere your questions 200 page hits is quite low, but a decent start, the number of unique vistors and page views per visitor is better indication of the quality of your site (once found) and how many people find it

Hits = any request to your server for any file; this could be an html, a jpeg, css, your favicon, whatever ... not a very good indicator.

Page View = a request for a web page. Since your site is really a collection of pages, this is a good baseline, especially if you have a lot of pages. I think I average 20 hits per page view.

Visits = the number of times a new session was launched on your web server. If someone pulls up a page, goes to lunch, and hits refresh an hour later, this is usually two visits. Hopefully, each visit will be a few pages.

Unique Visitors = a decent guess at the total number of people who looked at your site, since people can have repeat visits.

Hope this helps clarify things.

thanks, that was helpful

I think Page Visits is your best indicator of true traffic. That should show you the closest number to how many people are really accessing the site in a day.

I'm also a big believer in the average viewing time. The longer someone is on your site the more likely they'll be to buy something.

The ultimate indicator of how your web site is performing is sales.

So if you can improve your visits and the length of those visits, you should see sales jump up. That's what you're really looking for.

I went to your page, it took a little while to load and then it started playing music. Unless the music file in integral to your sales structure, I would remove it. It isn't doing anything but slowing down your page, bogging down the server, and - in my case anyway - annoying your viewers.

Best of luck on the site. Keep working on it.

your right Joe... i removed the music. aside from spending buckets of money there has to be another way to get to the front page. I was going to go with paid links on some of the top websites and then i read somewhere that to google paid links don't count. I now go back & forth from the 3rd to 4th page with my main keywords. I'm trying to make my home page more interesting to catch the search engines and the visitors eye. I rearranged my website because before it became too cluttery but I had more visitors and was on the 2nd page. I don't know.... I guess you do need a full time webmaster after all. I sound discouraged but I will not stop trying till there are tons of sales each day. I also know that i'm in a very competative business (mid century modern) there are millions of sites and i feel fortunate to be ahead of some of the big guys . . but then again , i don't know about their sales either. i'll just keep working on it. thanks for all your commments so far and keep them coming
spacyjane

serp page 4, and getting 200+ per day??
kidding... less than 10% of people will go to page 4.

OMG that's good then.

Jane - don't focus on your home page, make your home page a generic page about your business etc, but think about seperate landing pages for SERPS and SEO, look at my site for example, its about hotels, no way is my home page going to be number one for hotels, but most people search for hotel in vancouver or bangkok hotels, so I have pages that have bankok hotels and sub areas of bankok etc, this is where my traffic comes from, then people go to the home page or about us etc to learn more about the biz, then they book - sometimes .

Define what keywords you are targeting like this page http://www.modernabode.com/modern_abode_Glass.html could be 'modern glass vase" or something similar, and concentrate on getting those key words in the content, meta tags, title and inbound links to that page with the key words in or near the link text.
If you put aspinals hotel into google, you will my site come up, linking to a page thats about aspinals hotel (in singapore), the keywords that work for my home page is sigma hotels, and about 10 people month search for that

That's a great suggestion from Sigma. Good job. That's exactly what I'm working on right now for my company. I became the full time web master here about a month ago and after analyzing our sites for that month or so, I've learned that you definitely need these keyword heavy landing pages.

What I would suggest is that you have these landing pages internally linked somehow. Maybe make them category pages or something. The spiders have to be able to find these pages when they get to your main page. The spider will only find pages that are linked through that home page or one of the pages the home page links to. If there's no links going to the page, the spider doesn't even know it exists. Internal links are good, external links are better. Work these pages so they are as SEO friendly as possible then get links to them.

Basically, you're going to go from pushing your home page to search engines to pushing 8 to 10 pages to the engines. These other pages should rank higher for specific keywords just like Sigma suggested. You should see a large improvement in the site's rankings.

{I hope that's coherent - its first thing in the morning and I haven't had my coffee yet! If it's not, just complain about me. Thanks!}

thanks for those excellent pointers. i was spending some time on my other pages and then someone/or i read somewhere that you only have to optimize your home page. good, i'll go to work on them. you guys are super great and i really appreciate your comments.
spacyjane
jane in real life! lol

Jane - the great thing about focusing on more than one page (and good point from loganeast - you need internal links to these pages, easily found by humans and search engines) is that you can focus on a smaller group of key words of key phrases for each landing page, then your not into a one size fits all situation with your home page.

Again using my site and an example, a generic key word for nearly the whole site is hotel (or hotels) but destination specific key phrases apply to different pages, so for me I get traffic from searches like "genting highland hotels" and "Aspinals Hotel" - two completely different countries, very different search requirements really, but I can cover both in seperate pages, by focusing like this you can cover a greater range of keywords and phrases over your site and get more traffic overall, + the traffic is more targeted because the "modern glass vase" landing page is about modern glass vase's, not a generic home page covering all your products

Good luck

So far the advice in here has been top notch, and Sigma Hotels is making some excellent points. You should follow his advice.

Taking my site for example, the PageRank for the home page is less than a lot of internal pages. The home page is basically "welcome to my site..." while the internal pages are articles, photos with descriptions of the circumstances they were shot under, and a few bits of software. I guess it's like fishing with a net instead of a blow-gun; a lot more people find me through a lot of searches I hadn't even thought of.

Question: It sounds like you're getting somewhere in the ballpark of 250 pairs of eyes a day. Are they all coming from Google? From mostly one key phrase?

You might consider putting a link ( with your keywords as anchor text ) in your signature, like a lot of the people in this thread. The search engines don't have their eyes caught by a nice design; they simply count links, value them based on the page they're from, and act like the anchor text is actually on your page.

It's pretty good, but also try to increase your conversion rates.