I know I have a few readers who are fellow bloggers and like to pop in and digest our daily chatter, and if you’re one of them you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. For those of you who like to read rather than write, let me share with you a bit about what we can see from our side of the desk.
When you create a website, you have access to the analytics, in other words you get to look through a window and see how many visitors you’ve had, where they came from and how many of your pages they looked at whilst they were on your site…all that good stuff. Pretty much anything you want to know is in there somewhere if you care to look.
I’ve always been fascinated by the data. Right from the early days I’ve been giddy about the numbers, and I still get a buzz when I see that my site is busy with lots of people mooching through the blog posts and generally enjoying the chatter. My favourite thing though, is to look at the search engine box. It tells me how people find me, and it’s very often hilarious.
If people landed on my site through typing something into a search engine like Google or Bing, I can see which search engine directed them to me, and I can also see what they typed into the search engine. So for example if someone typed ‘Break Out The Skinny Girl’, they’d arrive knowing pretty much what to expect, you know?
So what if they typed ‘look at girls fat bums’…I suspect landing on the post Does My Bum Look Big In This? might not be quite what they’d hoped to find. I can imagine the poor bloke – I assume – sitting in Perth Australia with a salacious grin, and looking forward to a morning’s entertainment only to be presented with a debate about insecurities. Bless him.
Or what about the person in Southampton who keyed in FAT GIRLFIRNED GETING FLIRTED WITH…again, I’m not sure that Fat Flirting offered up the ‘who’s that at the door’ movie reel I suspect he was really after. How I hate to disappoint people…narf narf…
The one that made me laugh the most was the person in Germany who searched for the skinny asshole Blog, I mean way to go Google for delivering them straight into the arms of the posse…that’s not a bad guess, and they might have even intended to land in our pages for that one. I don’t imagine anyone actually writes a blog about a skinny asshole. Although I guess you never know, right..?
These are the tame ones…I’m here to tell you they get a lot more fruity than that and I can’t help wishing I could see the look on the face of the chaps behind the more (ahem) adventurous search requests when their search engine returns nothing more than the emptied-out contents of my head.
Tell you what though, I love the fact that after almost six months, these daily blog posts are getting so weaved into the web of the on-line world, that people are finding us by accident. That’s as cool as it gets!
I’m doing a trek to Cuba in October, to raise money in memory of my dad. You can read his story HERE and I would be so grateful if you’d help me honour his memory by donating whatever you can afford so together we can make a difference and help other people who have been affected by mental illness. Thank you!
My morning chuckle 🙂
Dee, Sorry I’ve been AWOL. I’ve decided to stop procrastinating and work on finishing my degree. this means I am working feverishly to journal what I do for a living every day and collect and annotate data that supports that I know what I’m talking about. Incredibly boring if you ask me and why it’s been such a challenge. That said, I’ve spend a TON of money to get this degree and the procrastinating is done.
I’ll be stopping by here and there, but I’m definitely going to be more of a silent stalker than a regular posse talker. Know I’m here and reading. All that said…
I will definitely make a donation for your cause. I’m expecting a little money shortly and I’d like to contribute. What a great cause. I’d be happy to support your journey.
I do think it’s funny how people find your blog. My search engine always says, “Tracey fit” or “Tracey’s getting fit”. It never says anything crazy. I would chuckle if it did. Maybe I need to add some crawlers to boos the ammo. LOL
Congratulations on how well your blog is doing. You always impress me.
Thank you on all fronts Tracey, I’m touched that you’d like to help me honour my dad. And congratulations on your studies, you strike me as the kind of girl who can do anything you set your mind to so I’m sure you have it in the bag…it’s like anything else though, right? Doesn’t come without the hard yards!
Congratulations on getting down to finishing Tracey!
That’s one thing i don’t know, how anyone has found my blog, mostly because as a tech idiot i have no idea where to look for such information.
Somehow i doubt i get to many accidental hits because of searches for anything racy. If so, they are bound to be very disappointed.
I’ll have to look for this, I don’t know how to find it on my blog. But I assume most of my readers clicked through from other people’s blogs rather than doing a search.
Chuck Wendig, an author who blogs about writing not weight loss (and very Not Safe For Work a lot of the time) semi-regularly does a post about this very thing, and it is hilarious! Absolutely my favourites of all his posts. He calls it “Search Engine Bingo” I think. The things people search for!
I’m not familiar with his blog but I’ll look out for it, it sounds very funny!