There is both good and bad in my newly learned technology abilities, since I have moved over to a self-hosted website and started to try to learn a little bit about HTML programming, running a website, optimization for search engines, and the other things you need to know to get people to somehow find your content out among the masses of available travel information on the web.
One of the big downsides is that I spend too much time on all of that stuff and haven’t been remotely as productive on the main project I have supposed to been working on in the last few months — writing my book.
One of the upsides is learning a little bit about the people that come and read my stuff. Where they are from. How long they stay on the site. What pages they view. And so on.
No, don’t know who you are specifically, but yes, you can track a lot of information from basic internet tools available to anyone that runs a website. And yes, every single website you visit is doing this, and more, to try to figure out how to optimize their product, in order to get more people to their site.
One of the things you are trying in search engine optimization (or SEO, in the parlance), is for one of your posts or websites to pop up on the first page of a google search. Here is one of the most popular posts on Go, See, Write – the hostel and dorm rules — popping up not only on the first page, but as the first result.
Just to show you that I don’t merely emphasize the more prurient aspects in life, in order to try to get more people to read, here is another recent Google search, where I appear on the first page. This is more of a how-to guide and provides some really important information on the recently awarded 2022 World Cup.
But when it comes right down to it, what is my website all about? Travel, overland travel, and exploring the world. This is obviously shown by some stats on how people found my site one day last week.
All travel, all the time.
Here are some other searches that somehow made it to my site. Enjoy the randomness of the internet while you take a look. One of the first things I do every morning is pull up information on how people found my website. At least twice a week, and starting to be more than that as more people come read, I get a good chuckle from what people are looking for on the internet…. and that they find me somehow from it.
one of my favorites - why search for this instead of just hitting enter?
she's consistently popular for me
In case you don’t follow me closely, the reason I get all these Kathleen Turner searches is the post I did on Romancing the Stone while I was in Cartagena.
literally no idea
Hilarious Michael. Mark Powers (PowersPercussion and The Donating Drummer) mentioned someone found his site va “Karol Gadja is sexy” or something along those lines. Kinda makes you wonder….
Anyway, you must be spending A LOT of time learning html skills because your posts are looking better and better all the time. However, I hope it’s not at the expense of your book as I’ve been looking forward to reading it for some time now.
many thanks on the site complements! Been working on it. Too much. Need to go to other quests soon.
This is very funny! Yes, they apparently searched, “i have a crush on karol gajda.”
Twitpic here!
Haha – enjoyed reading this. Now, these are the reasons I try to limit my time spent in Google Analytics. Such a time-suck for me! Often it provides more questions than answers…
Oh man, now I realize that I should have taken some screenies of the searches I’ve gotten. Love it!
I get some weird results on mine as well. My blog is all about Turkish travel and just this morning, I was reviewing my stats and someone came to my website by typing in “fat hairy Turkish men” I really do not want to know why they were searching that.
I just threw up a little in my mouth.
Great post 🙂 From my limited knowledge of the Cyrillic alphabet, it looks like that last one was “dolphin”…
ahhhh, soooo. That almost makes sense!
sometime its wierd where you find your site in searches in certain keywords
Your point about not writing your book because you’re doing your blog resonated with me. And not in a good way. Lalala *sticks metaphorical fingers in ears*. And, as someone midway through moving over to self-hosted, I’m feeling the inexpressed pain there, too.
Ho-hum. The search terms that embarrass me are the typo posts. Somebody found me for “midieval mosaics” (sic) today. I am not aware of ever having written on such a topic.
Rather more disturbingly, my blog is titled Travels with a Nine Year Old. I wrote a post about said spawn swearing (and have occasionally used profanity myself). Though I think the perverts who searched for “nine year old ****ing” will have been rather disappointed…
If there were only a way to ban people that found your website that way!
Thought there was only us sad enough to look for all the funny searches! 🙂 One thing to bear in mind – I made the mistake of writing that our local Turkish bath was for both the male and female ‘s’ (I’ll not write it here) rather than using the word ‘gender’. You wouldn’t believe some of the searches we’ve been found for! 🙂
you should do a post of them also!