Analysing blog search hits

One of the nice features that WordPress provides me as a blog owner is the ability to find out what search terms people have been using to find my blog. I check these fairly frequently, as they serve as a good guide to what the world finds interesting in my writing!

Here are some examples from the past seven days, and my comments on the search terms where relevant.

downloads for tomtom 910 This, or or some similar phrase about the TomTom GO 910, seems to appear in my search hits regularly. Clearly the fact that I have one is of great interest. I do have posts about my experiences with it, but the most popular post on my blog appears to be TomTom 910, still waiting – which dates from before I even owned one.

http://www.direct.gov.car tax / car tax online These are related to my second most popular post, from months and months ago, when I happened to mention that I thought the online renewal system for UK car tax appeared to work. I find it remarkable that I get so many hits from this single post.

sametime 7.5 messages truncate Fantastic to see that Sametime 7.5 has generated so much buzz, and that people have been coming to my blog to find out more. This particular search is somewhat worrying, as it implies that someone was having a problem with it. I’d love to know more about that.

Talking of Sametime 7.5, have you checked out the new developerWorks article on the location awareness feature?

marwellzoo pics and photos to copy Hmm. I’m not sure that I want people copying my photos, especially without asking. Presumably whoever ran this search will have found my photos. I wonder if they have used them in some way.

eclipse websphere message flows esql tut I assume that the last word was “tutorial”. I don’t have an ESQL tutorial here. Perhaps I should write one.

blue screen vmware Amazing, I only posted about my VMWare problems last weekend. Good to see search engines are keeping up.

amqsput source code For future reference, the source code for the amqsput program is in the C:\Program Files\IBM\WebSphere MQ\Tools\samples\c directory on Windows, or /opt/mqm/samp (or /usr/mqm/samp) on UNIX platforms. Assuming that you installed the samples, of course.

mq broker esb lacking Again, I would love to know what issues the person who ran this search was having. I wish they had commented somewhere to explain – sounds like the kind of dialogue that I’d be interested in engaging in. Just what did they feel that WebSphere Message Broker was lacking?

who has a bank holiday on 11th september I have no idea. Do I? No that was going to be the train drivers, but the strike has been called off.

photography for newsprint Hmm, this person will have been disappointed, nothing about photography there.

These represent just a tiny sample. I’m continually fascinated by the ways in which the content of my blog is being used. I could have made this post much longer. In general though, I’m satisfied that the majority of my posts – particularly the technical ones – seem to attract interest. Lots of interest in MQ and Broker related posts, and that’s one of the reasons that I’m here.

I should note that WordPress doesn’t provide me with any visibility of which search engines were actually used – just the terms. This is fine, but again sometimes I’m nosy and just want to know! I’ve sometimes gone as far as running the searches through the search engines to see how high up the list my posts come – I’m impressed when people have had to go reasonably far down the list (second or third page) and still visited my site!