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Friday, April 27, 2007

Top Ten Subliminal Searches

As I mentioned before more than half of the traffic to my blog comes from search engines. Of course, that doesn't count folks who read content in their RSS reader, but still its a significant number. What's sometimes fun to do is take a look at various search terms that people use to find my blog. This morning I had a really good chuckle because I saw that the search:
top 10 reasons not to do your homework
Put me in position number 2 on Google (at least on the servers in the US that I used). I'm sure glad my kids don't read my blog and to find out that somehow I support not doing your homework.

This made me wonder what else people were searching for, having me come up in the results list AND deciding to click on me. It also made me wonder if this tells me something about what people might think of me or my blog. Or if there's some hidden meaning that I somehow get found for these searches. Maybe there's a subliminal message hidden here.

So I looked back over the past two weeks to see what other searches were brining people to my blog. So I decided to make a list of the Top Ten Searches that might reveal something I didn't know about me and my blog:
10. motivating avon reps
9. worst design management
8. fun generator
7. call your parents
6. boston beer
5. synthetic happiness
4. party sign generator
3. impersonal questions that spark discussion
2. worst presentation
and my personal favorite:
1. top ten lamest people
Have a good weekend.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

At the risk of revealing just how "iggerant" I am, I am always curious as to how people know stuff like this. How do you where your traffic comes from? How do you know what searches people have used to find you? Occasionally, I will do a narcissurf, just to see if there is anything untoward cropping up about me (or my boys) on the web, but beyond that...

Explanations in dummy-proof terms, please!

Tony Karrer said...

Hi Karyn,

I'd suggest either using SiteMeter or GoogleAnalytics. I use both. SiteMeter is a great quick view of what's happened recently and GoogleAnalytics gives me more details.

Both require you to embed some javascript in your page. Once you do you get the reports that include things like referring pages, domains that visited, new vs. returning, search terms, etc.

Also, on narcisurfing - you should create a search for your blog on Google blogs search and get the RSS feed from the left and subscribe to that so you know when you get referrenced, and set up Google alerts for your name and your boys names so you don't have to remember to go back and do it again.

Kingdaddy said...

I'm addicted to this information, for much the same reason as you: it's alternately interesting, baffling, and hilarious how people find you.

I also discovered that someone whom I had written about, long ago, was hitting the blog every single day. Kinda creepy.

Anonymous said...

Hi Tony - thanks for the pointers. I have a sneaky feeling that the Google features you mention might be restricted to people with G-mail accounts which are only available in the US or by invitation to people outside of the US. I'll have to double-check that.

Tony Karrer said...

Karyn - Google Analytics is available to anyone - but you will have to create a Google ID - which does not require a Gmail account.