One of the really interesting things about having a non-LJ blog is that you can see the Google searches that people used to get to your site. Andrew Wheeler posted an amusing set this morning, and I’ve been collecting some the last few weeks, too. I’m treating this like a meme, then. :-)
I do, as one would expect, get a lot of hits for all manner of copyediting and proofreading queries (including amusing ones such as whoo do you use for proofreading?); but it looks as though the single most popular phrase people use to Google into my site is “Best frosting recipe” for my amazing Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting, which…you know, I actually never would have expected. :-) (And that search is eclipsed, actually, by variations on “Why do the bulls in Barnyard have udders?”)
By far the most hilarious ones to me are when people have typed in bits of horrid bad writing that match text in my Atlanta Nights chapter well enough to get a hit. :-D Thus we get searches like she grabbed the bulge in his pants, she saw my bulge, she smiled at the bulge in my, and she put her toes in my.
And then we get perplexing ones, like oh deana nothing and seyx and phrase starting with hard (and “there” and “also” and “t” and all kinds of other words or letters I can’t imagine why someone would wonder about), paint my fingernails for men, “pool boy is correct” and pronounce broadway.
The worst are the ones that make you just wish like mad that you could answer the poor person somehow, like the query that came from a major publishing house where the person had typed in “What does AU mean in copyediting queries?”
:-D
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I'm a freelance copyeditor specializing in fantasy and science fiction. SF/F novels I have copyedited have been finalists for (and have sometimes won) the Hugo, Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke, Endeavour, Golden Spur, John W. Campbell Memorial, Quill, Locus, Philip K. Dick, British Science Fiction, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy awards. In 2007 I became the first and only copyeditor ever short-listed for a World Fantasy Award.
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What does AU mean in copyediting queries? ;-)
My site has a few articles on on writing, getting an agent and so on, and the funniest search result I’ve seen was ‘How to get published’ – where the searcher’s domain was at one of the really big publishing houses.
I thought to myself ‘If they don’t know …’
How do you look at the search terms people use to find your blog? I’m curious what brings people to mine…
Sanguinity: Well, no author I know of has ever had trouble figuring it out. :-)
Simon: Yes, it’s surprising what comes from where. :-)
John: Sitemeter, Statcounter, and MyBlogLog all have nice counters that you can install in the footer of your page. (Google Analytics has a neat one, too, but it has more information than I need, and I don’t like the way it’s arranged.) All of them will tell you how many visitors you’ve had and will let you see how people got to your site.
Re: stats for blogs. I run pphlogger (freeware) for my websites and added the code to my blogger blog. There’s a small javascript component which I couldn’t upload to blogger (no ftp, naturally) so I hosted that on my own site and linked to it from the blog.
pphlogger recognises many search engines and extracts the search terms people used to get to your site. Runs on php and mysql, so your server has to support those.
If you have access to your website’s control panel, then you probably have a webalizer of some sort. That’s what I used.
I thought this looked like fun, so in a burst of procrastination, I sort of ran with the idea and made a collage-poem from my search strings.