For instance, Yahoo! is defined as a site. Within Yahoo!, every page where your company is found will have a specific URL. So, if a user searches your company by name, the page that provides the result will be one specific URL. If a user searches your company by product, the page that provided the result will be a different specific URL; and if a user searches your company by a different product search, the page that provides that result will be yet a different specific URL. By focusing on URL's, you can separate the users that are searching by company name, and concentrate on the group that searches by different product categories that will help focus on what URLs are providing you the traffic and will provide you with the foundation for your advertising decision.

Also, it is important to understand the "no referrer" statistic (usually top ranked). These are users (or visits) that in many cases already have a close working relationship with your company. These statistics normally result from a user:
* Having your site book marked
* Having your site in their dropdown address bar
* Having set their browser home page to your site
* Having entered your website into their address bar
* Having clicked on links contained in any document (usually e-mail)

In many cases, since these users are usually closely associated with your company, they should be discounted when evaluating prospects coming from your product search URLs.

You will see that there are many visits to your home page and your company's other URLs which are generated from the user visiting multiple pages of your site. A larger amount of these visits are derived from the user traveling through your Website since each specific page visited is counted. Also, the users that come in through the "non-referring site" or through another URL such as a job page are counted again if these users go to the home page and that is why your index page has so many visits. It is important to focus on the other referring URLs that represent new flows of traffic into your site.

What is a Web Server?

The web server is a program running on a networked machine, waiting for connections from the outside world to serve certain documents on behalf of a request by a browser.

To communicate, the server and the browser use an asynchronuous communication method called the HTTP (hypertext transaction) protocol . It works as follows:

1. the user starts the browser and types in an URL
2. the browser connects to the given host and requests the specified document.
3. The web server handles the request and sends out a response:

a. if this document exists, the web server delivers it,
b. if it does not exist or if access is not permitted, the web server sends back an error message instead.

The document delivered as an answer to this request may contain inline objects . Inline objects are simply URLs pointing to another resource, either a document, an image, an applet, a video/audio stream, or any other addressable HTML object. The browser then requests all inline objects of the current page from the server using the steps 2 and 3 above, before it can display the content of that page.

This communication method is called asynchronuous , because the browser sends out many requests for inline documents at once (without waiting for a response from the server before sending the next request) using different communication channels:

Since the browser's requests are often handled by different server processes or different threads of a server process, there is absolutely no relationship between the logfile entries caused by the responses from the server due to a request of a document and it's inline objects.

For example, the order in which the server logs the successful transmission of the document itslef and the inline images contained therein is not predictable and depends on the type of documents, objects, server speed, system and network load, and many other parameters.