September 7, 2005

Search engine visitors.

I've been getting a lot of extra traffic from Google and other search engines in the last three days, mostly people coming to read this post about Wolf Blitzer observing that the Katrina victims are "so poor" and "so black." I wonder if the interest in that bungled comment of his is really so great, which would be significant, or if I just happen to rank high in the searches, which is a boring happenstance. I have to resist getting absorbed in trying to understand things by reading my Site Meter reports. I find them fascinating, in a really low-level way — unfortunately.

4 comments:

The WordSmith from Nantucket said...

Yup...found you through a google search, looking for a video of it.

I'm not a fan of "gotcha!" moments and mispeak by politicians. We all blunder our words from time to time. It's still worth the chuckle though.

Monty Loree said...

ann: your blog is about politics and misc stuff. Aside from your advertisements, there isn't much competition in the political area with webmasters except for other blogs.

You've got a really high page rank with google and a search for link:http://althouse.blogspot.com/ says you've got 19,300 back links.

In yahoo you've got 435,000 back links.
link:http://althouse.blogspot.com

This is VERY respectable.

In my area, which is financial, Life Insurance, mortgages, debt settlement, credit repair etc, the main keywords have tons of competitors who are really adept at search engine optimization.

That's why I've taken on blogging. To generate a community and content that I normally wouldn't with my main "technical" web pages.

I would be the envy of insurance websites for example if my site was PR7 and backlinks of 19,300 on google!

So... keep up the good work. You deserve the traffic.

Joan said...

Ever since you first blogged on the search terms that people use to find their way here, I've been fascinated by my own similar stats. It always astonishes me how high up I am in the search results for "once more into the breech," and "judged by the company you keep."

I think it is fascinating to see what others are looking for, but I can well understand the necessity to resist the temptation to spend more than a few minutes on this data. I think this type of data-mining is not quite on the same plane of self-involvement as googling your own name, but it does come perilously close.

Monty Loree said...

joan: As you can imagine, there are people who do this type of analysis for a living.

In the world of search you can pay up to $50+ per click for a keyword on a search engine. At one point, mesothelioma (cancer caused by asbestos) was getting $175 PER CLICK on overture.

This means that a law firm or who ever owned the website was paying overture $175 every time some body clicked to go to their site.

Obviously, search engine optimization at this point would be pretty important. To get to the top of the search term organically means you don't have to pay out money for people to find you.

The beauty of blogging is that you can speak passionately about many different topics. In doing so, you're inadvertently 'planting' keywords about all types of topics.

(You can probably imagine that I'm one of those people who do SEO for a living and study keywords and how to rank #1)