However, hits are a poor way to measure site traffic. What counts is how long the visitor stayed on your site, how many hot buttons he followed to sections he read. Your web site is one of literally millions of pages of online information. And no one directory lists every single page on the web. To draw visitors to your site you must promote it.
Most visits arrive from somewhere else on the web.
Search engines, which attempt to catalog websites by topic, trigger a great deal of site traffic. You'll also get a lot of sites that don't. There are approximately 10 top search engines. New engines pop up all the time. Since each search engine organizes, acquires, stores and categorizes its information differently, the same search on different search engines is likely to turn up different results.