Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Thoughts: Visibility

I was looking at the stats for Card Boarded the other day and noticed something interesting. If you're familiar with Blogger stats, you know you can look at an overview of a blog's all time stats, which gives a summary of the most view posts, traffic sources, and total views.

When I look specifically at the most view posts, in first place was this post about Jimmy Howard's DocOc mask from early this season with 4,815 views. In a distant second was this post about a 2010-11 Victory Rack pack from Walmart with just 327 views.

Interesting, right?

This got me thinking about just how visible my blog is.

When I type "jimmy howard" into Google, nothing having to do with my blog pops up right away as part of the 3,100,000 results. That's to be expected though, as there's news, videos, pictures, and all kinds of other Jimmy Howard information out there. The first mention of my blog isn't until the 51st page of results.

When I type "jimmy howard mask" into Google, out of 196,000 results, Card Boarded shows up on the third page of search results. Not bad, but not really enough to get noticed, relatively invisible.

When I type "jimmy howard new mask" into Google, out of 179,000 results, Card Boarded is the third link on the first results page. That's what I would call visible.

When I type "jimmy howard collection" into Google, out of  6,030,000 results, Card Boarded takes the first, second, and third links. Add to that the eighth link to my Photobucket album for the collection. It's pretty neat to have the first result, let alone the next two. 

Keep in mind that these results are as of right now and will probably change over time, but it's still neat to take a look at where my blog stands in terms of visibility at the moment.

So, if you want something along the lines of a blog like mine to be visible, it's all about where it falls as part of search results, whether it be Google, Yahoo, or any other search engine.

Do any of you guys using blogger keep track of the stats? Do you notice anything odd within your stats?

3 comments:

  1. I use Google Analytics and check them every day. I like to see where in the world people are coming from (Canada edges out the US), how long they stay, how they are finding me (Google, other blogs, etc), and what keywords they used to get to my page.

    Every once in awhile, I notice a strange search string used to access my site (Is Patrice Bergeron hot? is one that comes to mind). Recently, a lot of people came to my blog by searching for Derek Boogaard (and every variation of his last name).

    I love me some stats.

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  2. Haha I do the same thing

    I've noticed I have a few regulars from the U.K, Finland, and Sweden.
    Sometimes, I even get 10 hits from Malaysia

    I've figured out I'm the first thing to pop up when you type in Luongo signed jersey in google, as well as google images

    neat post

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  3. the problem I have with google stats is they only count from whenevr that feature went live. So for blogs that have been around longer, they aren't that accurate.

    but like Casey said, there are some weird search strings that get people to my blog.

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