If you find my blog as a result of using a search engine you are in the majority of my readers. Some of your search terms are fairly obvious, e.g. “Scrapper Duncan“. Some of them are less easy to predict. Every day I get some visitors searching for “prince philip’s medals“. I think that’s because I once published a picture of Prince Philip and captioned it “medals from mummy”; he is so easy to muddle up with his son. A surprising number of people are looking for instructions on “how to have a cold shower“. Loads of people want to know about the “tory bastards” every day.
I’m pleased when I see a decent technical search like, “inurl:blog inurl:cable wires“, although I’ve no idea why anyone would like to read something which was actually in the URL rather than in the post itself. I neither know nor recall publising anything about “peter george grenfell 2nd baron st. just“. I suspect Google doesn’t either. Perhaps when it doesn’t know what to do with a search it just serves up random suggestions? I’m very often annoyed when people who should know better link to the Daily Mail but perhaps I should be pleased that search engines are sending some of their legitimate traffic to me – recently I received a couple of visitors searching for “english constituency map with towns daily mail“.
We all know that very specific search terms are likely to be successful. I’m pretty sure that I managed to answer the enquiry from the person asking, “did kate o sullivan get paid to citizens arrest tony blair“? On the other hand, I doubt very much that I was much use for whoever wanted to know, “fail to provide sample class a drug 63b(8) & 63 c(1) pace 1984“. Sometimes these specific search terms won’t find a clear answer on this blog when they are first made but they trigger an interest for me, because they relate to something I have already written about. Thus, I too will be investigating, “mika rasila freeman on the land“. However, you can be too specific. I’m pretty sure I didn’t help the person searching for “6. the speed of light in a particular type of glass is 1.60 x 1000000000m/s. what is the index of refraction of the glass?“.
Oddly, the most satisfying search terms to bring readers in are very often those with the fewest number of people searching for them. Clearly, very few people online want to know about “dartford conservative club” but for those that do, I draw some comfort from the knowledge that I have shown them how little they care about their own premises. A very large proportion of my traffic comes from these particularly obscure searches. In marketing, this is known as the long tail theory.
Finally, there are all the mispellings. If I was really cynical, I would put titles and categories on my posts which contained all the most common spelling mistakes and get a lot more traffic. What are “tribit baton“, “st pools cathedral sunday london” or the “space shittle“? Okay, I confess that this has been a bit of a lazy post. Actually, I’m a bit worried that putting all these search terms in one post will mess up my chances of getting all those visitors again although I’m not sure how they would be affected. Truth is, I’ve been waiting for my first ever guest post to arrive. Looks like that will be published tomorrow now. One to look out for!