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What Do People Search For? (And Why?!)

Over the last few months, my blog views have increased substantially.  In fact, I'm now only days away from crossing the 100,000 visitor mark!  While I never thought I'd approach any number close to that - I still feel like there is so much missing from my blog (like good writing skills *sigh*).  As you can see from the graph below, my humble little blog has been picking up steam lately:

In fact, at the time I took the screen capture (8:30 PM EST on 3/24/11), I already had more visitors in the first three weeks of March 2011 than I did in all of March 2010.

While I'm obviously happy with the way my blog is progressing - I'm completely stunned at how quickly (relatively speaking) the blog has taken off.  Back in March of 2009, I wrote a post "celebrating" my 10,000 visitor.  Two years later, I've increased my total number of visitors (almost) ten-fold!  Even more impressive, most of that growth has happened in the past half year or so.

In July of 2010, I wrote a post where I crossed 100,000 page views (for comparison, I now have 153,119 page views).  In that post, I mentioned that I was nearing the 65,000 visitor mark - so in eight months I've gained 35,000 visitors - over half of what I amassed in the first two years of my blog's existence!

For those that like numbers and statistics, I've placed the two tables side-by-side.  The first is from the aforementioned blog post back in July of 2010.  The second table is a copy of the one at the top of the blog.  Notice that I've managed between a one and two thousand visitor increase per month over the last year!

How did I manage to increase my views so drastically?  I'd like to say it was with better writing, more interesting topics, and my generally fun ideas.  However, I think it's more likely that it's simply a matter of posting more often.  Again, for comparison - at the end of August of 2010, I wrote my 1000 post for my blog.  Today, this particular blog entry is number 1,538!  That gain of about 35,000 visitors is probably most likely a result of the 538 blog posts within the last seven months!

Finally, thanks to Bloggers stats section, I can see what drives people to my blog.  Honestly, I recommend every on Blogger check out your own stats - there's some crazy stuff there.  For instance, when I looked today, I found the following searches that led visitors to my blog (not in any particular order):


  • fanofreds
  • rachael ray hot
  • bob rush
  • derek jeter signature
  • a picture of grilled food
  • athletes and teacher salary comparison
  • cheep ryan howard autograph  (editors note:  blog viewer typo, not mine)
  • racheal ray  (editors note:  blog viewer type, not mine)
  • rachael ray
  • beef nachos grande recipe
  • rachael ray feet

Wow!  Many of those searches make sense - especially the fanofreds search and even the nachos grande recipe search.  However, I was surprised to see Rachael Ray show up as such a driving force for visitors to my blog.  According to the Google search capabilities in blogger, before this post I had written exactly ONE post with Rachael Ray's name in it - and that was a review of a pair of Rachael Ray Skillets.

Apparently, I ought to include more pictures of Rachael Ray (though I won't be showing Rachael Ray's feet any time soon - ew!).  Also, while I applaud Rachael for doing what she can to sell herself - I don't think that's proper attire for cooking food for other people.  Also, you shouldn't lick the spoon until you are done baking.

Ok, I lied.  I did show a picture that happened to have Rachael Ray's feet in it.  Are you happy weirdo internet searchers?  I'm still certain her attire isn't appropriate for baking, but somehow I don't think most people mind.

Enough of that though, there's one other reason for the number of visitors that I have managed to attract - and this is something any up-and-coming blogger should take into consideration.  Get the "big boys and girls" to link to your blog.  For example, over the lifetime of Google's stat tracking (which is only nine months or something at this point), the following websites have been a source of a lot of my traffic:




And for that I am thankful!

However, it should be noted that the best way to attract people is still through search engines - Google alone has contributed 25,766 visits for my blog since it started keeping track (perhaps most looking for Rachael Ray and being mostly disappointed...at least until now)!

Image sources:
Rachael Ray 1
Rachael Ray 2

Comments

  1. I am going to have to stop reading your blog. I could totally understand Giada De Laurentiis, but Rachael Ray? Not cool, dude, not cool at all.

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