I like to have a look at the basic stats for my blog on a fairly regular basis, but I decided, today, that it might be fun to look at some of the more advanced things. OK... advanced by my standards... I realise that, for many of you, this stuff isn’t remotely advanced.
I went to sources and keywords.
I’ve heard all kinds of stories about how people get to websites, about the little trails they follow, about how people use google, about favourite search terms and safe keywords.
I was surprised to find that about half of the keywords used to bring people to my site were variations on my name. I had no idea that so many people knew my name, or cared enough to look it up. I was rather touched, and I thought it was cool.
To be honest, I was also a bit intimidated. If people know your name then doesn’t that mean something? If people know your name doesn’t it follow that they think they know who you are, or, at the very least, that they think they know something about you? Crikey! Perhaps they do.
It’s daft, isn’t it? The more people know my name the better, right? If people know my name they’ll use it, and, if they use it, more people will get to know it. What more could an artist of any sort want? What is more useful to a writer, actor, performer, musician, painter, sculptor or whatever than that people know his name? Much better to say, “Johny Harris is a wonderful actor,” than to say, “That bloke, whats-his-name, off that thing ‘London to Brighton’... You know who I mean... He was good, wasn’t he?”
I don’t know how I thought people would find my blog: by accident, I suppose, mostly.
Some of the other keywords used relate to friends and colleagues who have, very kindly, added my blog to their blogrolls, and I thank them for it. The others are rather amusing.
Some people even seem to have arrived at my blog by searching for ‘sex’, ‘corset’ and ‘making porn’.
It’s not that I don’t believe in the wondrousness of the internet. It’s not that I don’t believe that, for the most part, at least, it is a force for good. I’m also not daft enough to think that any of the people who typed in any of those last three search terms were converted to reading my ramblings on a regular basis, or even once, although one or two of them may have looked at a photo of me in my corset, which is kinda gross.
I do hope they found what they were looking for, but I can’t help thinking that most of those surfers must either be twelve year old boys (or, more likely 80 year old men, since kids seem to be very internet savvy), or web-virgins, and that they might want to learn to refine their search terms.
If I was looking for sex and I got the ramblings of a middle-aged woman writer I think it might put me off the internet for life.
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