December 2007 - Page 4 of 4

Bzzzz December 6th, 2007

Since I started looking at the statistics for Bumblebee Blog and the search terms that bring people here I have learned quite a lot.

For example, I have learned that if you post anything this time of year about Christmas gifts, even if it is about wacky gag gifts to your little brother, people will find you during the holidays with search terms such as “useful Christmas gifts,” “gifts for my bro” and “best Christmas gifts” and even “spiritual Christmas gifts for my mom.” My blog traffic has increased exponentially during this holiday season because of the goofy story about giving my brother gifts such as taxidermy and nose-picking garden trolls. I hope the silly gift exchange with my brother didn’t offend the folks looking for religious gifts!

I have also learned that if all you care about in blogging is the number of people clicking on your URL, make sure you use racy, sexy titles and phrases. You don’t have to use a lot. Just a few here and there will work just fine. After the comment exchange from my original post, People Google the Strangest Things, in which people mentioned some unintentionally provocative post titles such as “Wet and Wild” (about plants) and “Naked Gardening” (about the bareness of the garden), I started getting numerous hits for search terms such as “naked Greek people.”

Hoh! Not here!

Sue at the Balcony Garden attracted a Googler’s attention when they were looking for “Sex in the Beautiful Garden.” It landed that person at a story about the mating habits of the leopard slug!

Patrick at Bifurcated Carrots writes informative and detailed posts about such things as the foundation of his 325-year-old house in Amsterdam and weed burners. Nevertheless, the largest number of hits he has received was from a light hearted post about Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.

Carol at May Dream Gardens posted a Top Ten list of how people find her blog. It’s mostly plant related, but if you go back to the story she wrote around this time last year about blogging search terms, you’ll find some amusing search terms that landed them at her informative blog.

Thanks to fellow bloggers who posted related stories. Please visit them at:

Balcony Garden

Bifurcated Carrots

May Dream Gardens

On a related note, I was curious that some of the commenters on the original story said that they don’t know how to check their blog statistics or search terms. Although I am by no means an expert in this area, I will say that if your blog hosting service doesn’t provide this information you can probably add it fairly easily.

Two services I have tried are Google Analytics and StatCounter. I prefer StatCounter because it provides much more detailed information, including the geographic location of visitors, their paths through your blog, statistics about length of time visiting and repeated versus first-time visitors. The drawback of StatCounter is that if you get a significant traffic you may have to pay for additional storage.

To track statistics using either of these services takes a minimum of expertise to accomplish. To get started, generally you must sign up with the service, generate some HTML code and paste it into your blog in an HTML editor. I pasted mine into a widget in the menu bar so that it is automatically inserted into each page someone visits. Then you simply log into the service to see how things are going.

Happy blogging!

Posted In: Blogging