Category Archives: Random

The sheer magnitude of analytics available on the interweb is astounding. I guess that could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you look at it. Figuring out which words or phrases for which people are searching is important if your goal is to increase your readership and eventually get paid ads on your site, for example.  Or, you can do what I do: blog about the mundane things that happen in your life and hope that someone other than the people your parents paid good money to read your site¹ actually read it. Ahem.

I follow a motherlode of blogs and the majority of them reference their blog stats at one point or another. Until recently, I could have cared less about my stats. I knew WordPress tracked them, but I was not the girl who rushed home every day to check my stats, or even worse, refreshed my stats page on an hourly basis to find out how many more people around the world had read my blog.  Until recently, that is.

When I finally checked things out, I had a slight moment of shock and awe. Some of the phrases for which people search are pretty hilarious, such as “snidely whiplash bondage” or “how about texas? that’s a random state”. Or, my personal favourite, and post title, “girl riding shark”. I mean, seriously, if there’s some girl out there riding a shark, she is someone I need to meet. As much as I love being near the water, it would definitely not be me.

Also, let me just add that there seems to be an abnormal number of people — a plethora, I’ll say — out there searching for Dudley Do-Right. At least 15 hits per day come searching for my very brief reference to the great do-gooding Canadian mountie. Forget Google analytics and listen to what I’m telling you: blog about Dudley Do-Right and you’ll be a paid ad millionaire in no time.

Now, take a gander at some of the other phrases, and places, for which people have searched, and from whence they came, to feast their eyes on A Texas Girl’s Adventures in Canada. I’d say judging from the search terms, it has been an adventure, indeed…and to whomever had the ”nude thai girl date”, my invite must have been lost in the mail. 

The last 25 searches that brought people to my blog:

And lastly, some good old-fashioned geek stats for the monstrous nerd in me!
2009 blog postings: 64, because I believe quality is more important than quantity)
2009 blog postings still in draft form: 46 (ditto above)
Number of blog visits to date in 2009: 16, 457
Average number of hits per day: 55
Most popular blog post: Reason #7,482 Why I Love My Province
Busiest day on my blog so far: Sunday, June 21, when I posted The Day I Joined the iCult
Number of blogs I follow on Google Reader: 49
Number of blogs that are currently unread on my Google Reader: 367. Clearly I have some work to do.