Thursday, April 12, 2007
for the greater good
so I use StatCounter to keep track of the traffic that the blog gets. One of the neat things to see is how people find the blog in the first place.
A majority of the hits do not come from following a link. These are fine folks like you who happen to have the sight bookmarked and just come directly here. And of course I get a bunch of hits from people following the links on the blogs maintained by my friends and family.
What can be fun to see however, are the links that people follow from search engines. By looking at these, you can see which words they searched for and what the results were that lead them here.
Most of the time, these are searches which overlap with my own interests and happen to be stuff I've posted about. Food, sausage and soccer being prominant themes. Then there are some funny ones which don't really seem to make sense, like 'boggle arena', which hit because I used the word boggle (as in boggles the mind) in a post that also mentioned former US National Team coach Bruce Arena. What was that person hoping to find exactly?
And needless to say, very often my blog is not the most relevant or helpful place for the searcher to learn more about what they're interested in. At best, it's at least relevant and not a complete waste of time. Like hits for the recent lamb dinner post. I assume those folks searching for 'boneless leg of lamb' might be happy enough to read how the meal went.
But never has my blog been the best place to find an answer to a question....until NOW! I recently received a visit sent from the results of this search, where one of my blog posts was the only result! That post is the only place online to find out how to correctly pronounce Sesachacha.
So to whomever that was searching, I'm glad you found that post and I hope that the folks you next spoke with about that pond were duly impressed that you could correctly pronounce it's name.
so I use StatCounter to keep track of the traffic that the blog gets. One of the neat things to see is how people find the blog in the first place.
A majority of the hits do not come from following a link. These are fine folks like you who happen to have the sight bookmarked and just come directly here. And of course I get a bunch of hits from people following the links on the blogs maintained by my friends and family.
What can be fun to see however, are the links that people follow from search engines. By looking at these, you can see which words they searched for and what the results were that lead them here.
Most of the time, these are searches which overlap with my own interests and happen to be stuff I've posted about. Food, sausage and soccer being prominant themes. Then there are some funny ones which don't really seem to make sense, like 'boggle arena', which hit because I used the word boggle (as in boggles the mind) in a post that also mentioned former US National Team coach Bruce Arena. What was that person hoping to find exactly?
And needless to say, very often my blog is not the most relevant or helpful place for the searcher to learn more about what they're interested in. At best, it's at least relevant and not a complete waste of time. Like hits for the recent lamb dinner post. I assume those folks searching for 'boneless leg of lamb' might be happy enough to read how the meal went.
But never has my blog been the best place to find an answer to a question....until NOW! I recently received a visit sent from the results of this search, where one of my blog posts was the only result! That post is the only place online to find out how to correctly pronounce Sesachacha.
So to whomever that was searching, I'm glad you found that post and I hope that the folks you next spoke with about that pond were duly impressed that you could correctly pronounce it's name.
