I posted earlier today on an experiment to see if including lots of popular search engine terms would bring lots of visitors to Bishop’s Blog. A company called Wordtracker have a good online/downloadable guide to the theory by the way that you can see here. It’s perhaps just a bit worrying that it’s major example is about selling vegetarian pet food (ot perhaps that’ll get lots of hits) …
Anyway, we’ll see how the experiment runs, but to date none of the clever words have led to search-engine clicks through to the esteemed Bishop’s Blog, while the most popular one that people have used turns out (for some unfathomable reason) our lord looking over a picnic.
Meanwhile, I have been installing a couple of new widgets that WordPress.com users like me can paste into text boxes in their sidebars (the operation is really quite painless, sir) alongside Feedjit that I was already using. That’s the one that generates the Live Traffic Feed box with the pretty national flags. On WordPress though you don’t get more detail than the approximate area the visitor seems to be coming from (it’s ISP registration place I suppose). And it doesn’t keep a tally of how many people have passed by.
So I hunted around a bit and hit on two other widgets that have probably betrayed my identity to the world, since they must be in this game for a reason, but I am trusting their words that the actual identities of everyone are secret and they’re just indulging in trafficking – well I suppose that’s not the right word, but I mean identifying patterns of traffic that are commercially of value to others.
Clustrmaps gives you a nice little world map to decorate your page, which has a visual indication (the red dots) of where visitors have come from, and keeps some stats behinds the scenes that you can access.
It doesn’t give you the classic Counter though, 
and for that I’ve turned to StatCounter. A bit of code pasted into the text box generates the counter, and you can then click through to their site and access some very detailed information about just who is visiting from where, going on to where, and all the rest.
Both widgets are free as long as your website/blog is weeny like mine, but if you start getting more than 500 visits a day StatCounter for instance will want to charge you for the service. Fair enough really. As I said, knowledge is (power) money.
But hang on, ordination photos is about to overtake our lord’s picnic …
Filed under: Technology , Blog, counters, website
mmm, that didn’t make sense. I meant to write, “Blogging is an elusive animal which is more likely to master the writer than the writer is to master it.”
Bit of a mind to keyboard misfire.
In Christ,
Mark
Buzz word experiment a total misfire too (though I’m not surprised – more intrigued). See next post for stats.
Hi there,
So it’s been a few days now… Are you as popular as Angelina Jolie?
Blogging is an elusive which is more likely to master the writer than the writer is to master it.
Cheers,
Mark