This goes out to all you fellow bloggers, both pros and “ham and eggers” like myself. How many of you have noticed this? You toil and slave over a very personal post, spend night and day making it absolutely perfect and yet despite the time invested get very few hits. Other times you can write something that you either didn’t put that much effort into or like writing that much and with this post, you get scores of hit on your site. My stance is that hits are hits and it means someone has found your site, may like what they see, and decide to stick around for a while. But back to why the most poured over posts get the least amount of interest – maybe it’s the subject matter, maybe it’s because you wrote about something on which few people can relate. Regardless it make me very curious why? Is it minimal site awareness, lack of post relevance, interest of subject matter, or something else??
Well honestly, it doesn’t bother me (that much, tear) as I do this because I love writing about what I like. However what I am really curious about is why some seemingly throw-away posts (yes we do post some “fire and forget” things here) get so much attention solely because of a few select keywords. It boggles my mind how something as buzzworhty as House, M.D. or Kristen Stewart can get more draws on our site when there is a plethora of places to find “fanatical” and more in-depth info all over the internet. Why is it that of all the great places on the web do people stumble to our “hobby blog” when I have tried using the same words and we don’t even make an appearance in the first 10 pages of any search engine??
So where do the hits come from? We don’t mind the traffic but get a little discouraged because hit counts on some days are high for, what we believe, all the wrong reasons. We figure hits don’t really reflect the pure interest of people searching for something we’ve written because the terms are so very broad and we don’t write about those “buzz-worthy” topics very often. In those cases, we just get what I call a “mis-hit”. That’s a hit on our site that was really meant for something else as the searcher only stumbled here due to the fact our post matched some of their key words. Humpf, and I thought people wanted to know about what we thought was cool:P
The main reason I’m writing this at all is to voice my confusion about the things people search for and the parameters of a search engine I guess. If people really wanted up to date info, we’re certainly not FirstShowing.net or FoxNews, or even TMZ where all three places can give you the absolute latest and certainly more official info on a topic of choice. Based on our inability to find ourselves using the same terms means there must be people out there really scouring the internet for their subject of choice. But again, I’m not going to look a gift “site hit” in mouth. I’ll admit I smile when I check the numbers at the end of the day but that smile fades just a bit when I find out the numbers come from some “mis-hits”.
Just some late night thoughts to round out the week. Anyone finding similar occurrences?
5 Comments
rtm
I feel the same way about this sometimes. The funny thing is the post where I honestly admit I’m having blogger’s block or basically have nothing to say gets pretty decent hits or even more than those I’ve spent hours writing (mostly reviews). But I’ve recently realized I haven’t tagged my posts properly so I went back and fixed ’em.
Btw, I’ve nominated you for Kreatif Blogger Award as I always looking forward to reading it: http://wp.me/pxXPC-Pb Keep up the great work & I’ll keep on coming back! 🙂
Marc
So if I don’t keep up the good work, you’ll drop me like a bad habbit? No Ruth, don’t leave G-S-T;)
Here’s something especially for you. For years, I have been interested in many different languages and have leaned phrases and words from people from foreign countries…one gem I have been holding on to since college is that 2 girls from Indonesia taught me to can sing the first verse of “We wish you a Merry Christmas”…Take my word for it, because to spell it out probably wouldn’t come out as intended:)
rtm
He..he.. Se-la-mat Ha-ri Na-tal (3x) … and Ta-hun Ba-ru (Happy New Year)! Indonesian is super easy, most words are pronounced as they’re spelled, and practically no grammar rules such as tense, etc. I’ve known English nearly all my life and I still trip on those grammar stuff all the time, but hey at least we tend to be better spellers than most native speakers 😉
skykid
Sometimes its hard to predict which post will receive a lot of traffic, and not all posts receive that traffic on the same or the next day on which they are published. I have cases in which one post suddenly becomes quite a hit after months of having only a few hits. While when I am doing my reviews I am hoping that the readers will be able to relate to something written to them – in every single one I make sure that if I review a film there is something in it I can relate to – which is probably the main reason for me to pick the niche of my blog. Writing a good content will eventually bring you traffic and devoted visitor even if not all of the articles are optimized for the search engines. In fact doing just that optimization correctly is quite a time consuming tasks – and one as to be able to devote some time to it – which is most cases is not that easy as the most important thing is the content itself – not the keywords that describe it .
Any blogger keeps tracks of the amount of traffic his articles get , even if he says that he does not care about that. I myself am more interested in building a community of devoted readers who will be willing to voice their views via comments – thus adding extra value to the things that are written i specific review or article. Of course its more easy to find these people if your blog has more hits – as you never know when someone who had no idea of your blog existence will stumble upon something of interest to him/her – will leave a comment , receive response and decide to keep up with that blog from that moment on.
Marc
Wow, thanks for the super informative comment and suggestions!! I have been considering a niche myself as right now, we’re just a mixed bag of a blogsite. I was talking to a friend and he suggested narrowing my content to be a little more concise and focused. That’s advice I’m going to take because I feel like right now we have no structure. We have some categories to our posts but since we post whatever we want when we want it, this all feels kind of irregular. Something scheduled might help us with our traffic and keep us from feeling lost.
Got a few idea for new features but not exactly ready for when that will go live. Thanks again!