Tracking Page Views

Here's a pretty decent, and not terribly technical, rundown of hits, pageviews, etc.

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You might want to check what Sitemeter defines as a pageview.

I suspect that's where you'll find the difference.

The problem is that both of them use different methods to track, and both depend on Javascript to interact with the server.

Neither is particularly accurate when compared to raw server stats.

I wouldn't worry so much about the specific numbers. What you want to happen is:

Increasing unique visitors over time, say month to month and year to year.

You want repeat visitors, and you want those numbers to at least remain a steady percentage of the unique visitors, but ideally, you'd like that percentage to rise too.

You also want to have an increasing percentage of unique visitors spending longer on your site.

Pay attention to the referrals, that is, how visitors are finding your site/page/content.

Search engines?
Links from elsewhere?

You want both solid numbers of incoming visitors from "organic" searches, but you also want incoming traffic because other people linked to your content. You want steadily even if slowly increasing numbers/percentages of unique visitors finding you because they clicked a link on someone else's site.

I use StatCounter to track my visitors. But because my blog is on Wordpress, I am unable to see where they come from (what link they clicked on) or what link they clicked on my site. That's frustrating. But I like StatCounter much better than Wordpress's.

Personally, I think Google Analytics is the most accurate. I compare it to Wordpress and the only thing they have in common is the percentage of hits from day to day, but not the actual number.

Yeah, I figured out early that Blogger's numbers are not the most accurate. I use Google Analytics. I check it once a week and compare. Analytics shows me what links they followed to get to my site, what region they're from, how long they spent on my blog, and even what network they were on when they looked at my blog.