Metablog ‘ing on Google Things

I’m not sure how I’m going to dri­ve traf­fic to my blog with this post, but I’m record­ing here some thoughts about the traf­fic I see com­ing to my blog and some of the analy­sis that Google gives me.  I’m pret­ty care­ful to set all the search engine opti­miza­tion things that I’ve been told are good… and I’m pret­ty sure that well named/commented images are a big por­tion of what’s dri­ving traf­fic to my site; but let’s start with some cool metablog sta­tis­tics.

75 coun­tries.  Wow.  There’s a few I can’t even place with­out using Google maps like “Mau­ri­tius” (island about 400 miles east of Mada­gas­car) or “Guernsey” (island between Eng­land and France, much clos­er to France)

1000-ish hits per month.  That’s on the rise again.  It was very high at the begin­ning of the “Volde­mort” spike, but 1k/month is pret­ty good, I think.  Google says that 90% of my vis­i­tors are new (that is: 1st hit ever from that vis­i­tor this month) while the oth­er 10% are return­ing.  I sup­pose I have a few friends, then.  Google also records 58 lan­guages in browsers read­ing my site.  Most peo­ple spend a few sec­onds on my site, but 4.9% spend a minute or three and 2.35% spend 3 to 10 min­utes.

Even though most peo­ple spend very lit­tle time, 18% read two pages and 3% read 3.  14 hits per month are from peo­ple who have read my side over 200 times.  Not sure how to rec­on­cile that.  Ded­i­cat­ed read­ers are read­ing less often?  I sup­pose I need to update more.

There are lit­tle things like Google 70%/Yahoo 5%/Bing 3% or Chrome 40%/Firefox 35%/IE 12% and even Win­dows 78%/Mac 14% (iPhone 1.57%/FreeBSD 1.47%/Android 1.27%/Linux 1.27% … etc (even have hits from PS3 and Wii)).

But I sup­pose the most inter­est­ing (again) are the key­words.  Volde­mort is still the top per­former gen­er­at­ing 275 vis­its.  TF2 (Team Fortress 2) is 2nd at 206 vis­its.  Both of these posts have graph­ics.  The TF2 post even has movies.  A smat­ter­ing of oth­er key­words (like wal­ter­nate 🙂 go quick­ly down from there.  Accord­ing to the search rank­ings that google gives me, I place high­ly (5.8) for wal­ter­nate and TF2 (8.3).  I used to place high­ly for volde­mort, but I’m now posi­tion 23.

Look­ing at uncom­mon search­es for which I place high­ly, “Buffy Hush” tops the list, which is cool (it’s also from the Volde­mort piece).

I sup­pose the total of $41 is worth men­tion­ing.  It’s been almost a year now.  Not much… but maybe it’s just me not writ­ing enough good con­tent.  Sigh.