02.02.06
Write about what people are interested in
Over the past few days, I’ve started to notice something interesting when analyzing my site statistics. I use AwStats to analyze my log files, and one of the more interesting outputs is frequently searched keywords.
The top few searched keywords which generated hits to my site were directly related to my content: “ebay”, “12dailypro”, and ”blogging”. No surprise here. What caught my attention was that just below these hits, still near the top of the list were search terms which were not at all related to my site. These were results like “Eminem”, “Awards”, “Super Bowl” and I started to think what the heck?.
All of these hits were directly due to my Current Top 15 Internet Searches page, which is updated dynamically. This made me start to think that writing about these terms actually really does drive traffic to your site.
If you are short of ideas for your blog, or are looking for some quick traffic, try writing about something on this list.. chances are you will get a few extra hits.
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I’d be interested in the clickstream of those users. While they may be finding your site, I wonder how many people searching for “Eminem” hang around once they get here. Sure, it’s great for running up your state by grabbing a few extra page hits, but other than being a search engine honeypot, what is it adding to your site?
Wayne,
They don’t stay around. But that doesn’t really bother me. From analyzing my site stastics over the past two months, I have found that there are two types of visitors: regular readers / one-time readers who came here for my content, and those visitors who came here searching for “Eminem” or “NASCAR”.
Those users searching for something other than my content usually hit a page like this one: http://www.cwire.org/newsSearch/Eminem/. They then stick around for 0-30 seconds (based on my log files), and then click an advertisement link and bounce off my site.
Now do you see why writing about these keywords is important?
“Those users searching for something other than my content usually hit a page like this one: http://www.cwire.org/newsSearch/Eminem/. They then stick around for 0-30 seconds (based on my log files), and then click an advertisement link and bounce off my site.
Now do you see why writing about these keywords is important?”
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Dude,
This is brilliant!
Thanks for the tip.
Max
Its amazing the sort of keywords people use on the major search engines to come across and click through to your site, ive had visitors from all over the world and knowing my website is on the first page for certain keywords on their countries search engines brings a smile to my face.
If you don’t mind me asking, what are you using to create the dynamic search list and the subsequent pages?
Thanks for this great plugin! Works fine - only my old PDA doesn’t understand UTF-8 - most blogs are coded like this - so special characters aren’t displayed correctly.