Hits
I am obsessed with who is reading my blog. I was looking at the "referral" section of SiteMeter and found that someone had emailed my blog around. I don't think these are links that I sent out because one of them is in Missouri and the other two are in Malaysia. They are all using Yahoo mail.
I got another hit off a friend's blog.
I get a hit from SiteMeter itself. It turns out to be another blogger checking a hit from my page to theirs (via the next blog button I'm sure). His SiteMeter results are exposed for any one to view. I go poking around. This liberal so-and-so gets more hits in an hour complaining about the world than I get in a week.
One of the hits is from a comment I left on someone else's blog. I try to leave a link to my blog from every comment. Many people turn off comments because of all the spam. I recommended to a couple of people to turn on the word check feature in Blogger. That helps a little bit.
I still get hits daily from George Carlin Radio. I blogged about the page and the administrator commented that he mentioned my blog in one of the news articles on his site. How cool is that?
Fifteen percent of the hits on my blog use FireFox. That is too cool.
Several of the referral pages are listed as "unknown". This can mean many things. Either the mechanism used to gather information from the browser is disabled locally, or it was from a shortcut. These hits might come from people who have bookmarked my site. That is kind of cool.
Then come the search results. These break down into two categories. The hits from Google Image search kind of piss me off because it does not necessarily mean the people saw my page. I know that I don't go to the source page all the time when searching for an image. Many times I just steel it off Google's page without even looking at the author's information.
The other type of search is pretty cool. These are the web searches. I find hits all the time for things that have absolutely nothing to do with the content of my blog. I got a hit the other day for "Kelly eats worms". Where the hell did that come from? These folks at least got to my page at some point. Even if they were just clicking on every single result, they had a chance of viewing my content.
Some people's lives and careers hinge the hits to their content. It would drive me mad if my livelihood depended on the fickle hit meeter. I don't pretend to understand how any of this stuff works. I know that the best way so far to bring traffic to my blog is to comment on others in an intelligent manor. I will continue to obsess and bring you the details here.