Bodiam Castle? Google Is Your Friend…

I have been looking through the website logs to see just what it is that drives people to this site and, while lacking in raw comedy value (unlike some), it has been interesting.

Running a combination of Firestats, Feedburner and Google Analytics it seems this blog is getting around 400 visits a day. From these around 80% are new (which shows just what a non-loyal readership we hold…) and of those around 70% come here from a search engine – nearly all from Google. For the numbers-fans, this translates to about 200 hits a day from Google searches. Given the insanely varied nature of topics here, you would be excused for thinking this was reflected in the search stats. Not so.

Of the top ten search terms used to come here, seven are image searches, and this accounts for about 90 of the incoming hits. Even stranger, of these over a third are all searching for images of Bodiam Castle.

Now, Bodiam Castle is a gorgeous, fourteenth century fairytale castle in East Sussex, run by the National Trust, so I can understand why people are interested in it. In fact, I understand this well enough to have uploaded another photo!

Bodiam CastleIf you have come here searching for Bodiam Castle, I hope you like this, and you can even see more on Flickr. It has been a long time since I have been to Bodiam so please, forgive me for the photos being out of date now. If you have links to other pictures of this gorgeous castle, please let me know and I will be more than happy to link to them from here.

Back onto the search topic, there is the determination issue to consider now. Will my posting of a new Bodiam article increase the amount of hits I get for this? Are people massively disappointed when the Mighty Google sends them here rather than elsewhere? Why dont people use Yahoo to search for Bodiam?

The other common terms people use for an “images search” are:

  • Schwarzenegger
  • Nice Art
  • Fine Houses
  • Holy Wafer
  • Jesus Toast (around 5 people a day come here using that search term… MADNESS)
  • Future Castles

Now, some make more sense than others, but I can only guess at the disappointment people must feel when their searches lead them here.For completeness, the most common search terms that bring people to this site are:

  • HDR How To (use Photomatix)
  • Cool Viking Names (well all of them)
  • Bad Journalist (again, all of them)
  • Firefox Memory Hog (it is)
  • Pipex Download Speeds (almost non-existent)
  • McCanns Blog (wrong place, I didn’t even know they had one)

One last point, a bit of an oddity is a search term Feedburner has identified leading some poor unfortunate here: “blog: I cannot read, feel distracted” – I have no idea what this blog has to offer this poor person.

6 thoughts on “Bodiam Castle? Google Is Your Friend…

  1. TW:

    This analysis reads funny to me because at some time or another, all bloggers contend with this question “What brings traffic to my blog?” 🙂

    I once wrote a post on the 5 highest-traffic-driving searches on my blog and they were:

    * Indians are the most intelligent people

    * career meat-eating women (What is this???)

    * the negotiable cow (WTF?)

    * only fat white women marry hindu men (Exactly why does this string bring people here?)

    * diagrams of vegetarians (I am so amused, I want to run this search and see…)

    The tragedy is when we know, truly know, what posts these search strings find them, don’t you think?

  2. Shefaly
    suspect the tragedy would be if made sense
    I’ve had to edit this- it was posted, half-finished, in a moment of absent-mindedness.
    I was trying to say-
    The tragedy would be if the searches made sense in terms of the blog content.

  3. As an odd bit of commentary, I have looked at Feedburner stats and so far today, 91 people have viewed this post in their RSS feeds and 36 people have actually viewed this page (in addition to the ones who have viewed it on the home page).

    Out of all these people, only 1 has clicked through to the flickr image.

  4. Thanks for the tips. I’m going to start including pictures of fat white women taking money from cows in front of Bodiam Castle on all my political pieces at Grumpy Lion.

    Do you think it would work better if the women were naked? Or the cows dressed?

    Decisions, decisions…

  5. Pingback: Misplaced ads » Why Dont You Blog?

Comments are closed.