searchin'

It seems like every blogger likes to look at statistics and I'm no exception. For instance here are the most popular search terms used by visitors who arrived at my site this month.


tortoise shell cats
cedar elm
spider lily
tortoise shell cat
texas star hibiscus
spider lilies
cat photography
time lapse photos
abraham lincoln mexican war
lincoln and the mexican war
lincoln mexican war
rain lily
esperanza plant
prairie points
cinderella story -ever -after
zexmenia
brazos de dios
dallas women
hummingbird moth
abraham lincoln and the mexican war

Not a bad list of things to be known for. By and large they make sense to me. I just hope the searchers found something useful.

By far the most popular post to this weblog has been the one on my cat Julie. I don't know how Google works, but I think that the more hits it gets then the more likely it is to turn up on searches and hence the more hits, etc. So I guess it may stay popular for awhile. I love that I keep getting comments on it months later.

Another item of interest (at least to me) is that sometime during this month the number of comments began to exceed the number of posts. I've never had a huge number of commenters (or readers) so it's nice to see more. I recently decided to give them a little more prominence by showing the most recent ones on the side-panel.

Something else I've been trying to do is corrollate the days my traffic is highest with something. I was surprised to see that my highest traffic during the month occurred during the time when I took several days off from blogging. Does this mean that traffic would go through the roof if I gave up posting altogether? Seriously I felt guilty thinking of people who came here and found nothing new.

Posted by Bill Hopkins on November 25, 2003 11:50 PM
Comments

nah Bill, can't quit blogging...maybe hits go up when Joel or I refer you? or when you comment on another blog and people are surfing. That's how I found you...from Pureland Mountain!

Posted by: Mary Lou at November 28, 2003 05:09 AM

couldn't possibly quit - it's too much fun.

Posted by: bill at November 28, 2003 07:19 AM

One thing I've found is that when I stop blogging for a day or two it seems to give time for people to read and digest the entry before replying. Some of my posts tend to be very long, and just as when I read another person's long entry and need time to think about it, perhaps others are the same. When you keep posting every day with no letup I think people get a little overloaded with information. So I think either posts should be very short or else time is needed between long posts.

Just a theory.

Posted by: Miguel at November 30, 2003 04:43 PM