Why Dont You Blog?

A while ago (19 Mar), I made a post here looking at the search terms most people used to get here. At the time we were comfortably getting 400 hits a day and the huge majority of them were people searching for Bodiam Castle.

Well, nothing has changed. We are still hovering around 400-450 hits a day, although there was a spike to 600 when a previous post got Stumbled. These are still around 80% first time hits, so we need to think about why people aren’t coming back. Of the first time hits, 80% (slight increase) are from search engines but still nearly all are from Google searches. Shame really, as I now prefer Yahoo search…

Anyway, the odd part is that the search terms haven’t changed either. Depending on your source (firestats differs from Feedburner and google analytics) the most searched for term is either “Fine Art” or “Bodiam Castle.” This terms are supplemented by such relevant terms as “castle” “castle with moat” “bodiam” “fairytale castle” and “art.” In all 60% of the top ten search terms through which people find our wonderful blog are castle ones. The remaining four are “McCann Blog”, “Obama” and the very odd “wtf” & “there.” I feel sorry for the people who arrive from some of these terms - no wonder we dont get repeat visitors.

I can live with two of them… It is strange, given the well thought out social commentary Heather posts that nearly all the searches people use to find our sites are for castle pictures. Is this a sign that more people search for castles than (say) Surveillance state or that our blog is just better ranked for castles…?

Still beggars cant be choosers, so as you can see I have pandered to the masses once more with another picture of the gorgeous Bodiam Castle, it really is an artistic castle picture (:-) ). If you are in the south west of England, you really should visit.

Popularity: 43% [?]

Popularity: 43% [?]

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!

If 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.

Popularity: 86% [?]

Popularity: 86% [?]