Every so often we look back at who has visited this blog to see just what has interested our visitors.
One measure here is the most popular entry pages.
Looking at the last 100 visits, the front page itself - the main blog address - was by far the most popular with 63 hits. This covers those who came to the site direct, plus those who came via search engine references that picked up the main page.
By far the next most popular entry point with eleven visits was The Importance of Demography and Demographic Change - an Update, a stocktake post summarising various previous posts on this topic across several related blogs. This was a helpful reminder that it is time we updated this material.
This was followed by six posts with two direct hits each.
- Our 9 November 07 post on Building Local Tourism
- The 8 November post on Teleworking a personal perspective
- The 17 November case study on the potential use of blogs as a communication device in specialist medical colleges
- The 20 May 08 post on Demographic Change and the Problem of Ageism
- The 5 June post Changes in Australian Higher Education - UNSW's Singapore Problems
One of our problems with this blog is to know what will interest our readers, given the broad span of interests of our Ndarala professionals. Here the most popular entry points provide a guide as to areas where we might provide further information and comment.
Another way of monitoring and assessing visitor patterns is to look at individual referrals. This one is more complicated, simply because of the difficulty in counting and presenting a varied pattern.
No less than 48 of the last 100 visitors came direct to the site, a very high percentage compared with most sites where search engines are the main driver.
Some 10 visitors were the dreaded spam blogs. Six visitors came from referrals from other Group related sites and especially my personal blog. Three visits came from feeds.
This leaves 31 visitors who came in via search engines. The low search engine percentage is partly a consequence of in-house traffic - my own visits are not counted, partly reflect the fact that the site is still quite new, partly that we have sometimes had difficulty in maintaining regular posts because of other pressures.
Our experience across sites has been that good search engine recognition depends upon the combination of regular posts with good accumulating content.
As you might expect given the entry page rankings, there were 11 searches on various aspects of demography and demographic change. Some of those searchers would have found our material useful, others not.
The next largest group were five searches linked in some way to public administration. This is an area where we have a part completed series of posts drawing heavily from my own experience. There were three searches linked in some way to management perspectives, then came two searches linked to UNSW.
From this point, the remaining ten searches were all individual topics from teleworking to time management.
There has been a fair bit of discussion over time on the importance of the tail in web site and blog promotion and development. In our case, the tail is the last ten hits on individual topics. The argument is that the tail provides clues as to visitor interests that you might build on to attract further traffic.
In our case, individual search terms in the tail included Sydney Aborigines history, Dilanchian, intellectual property audit, steps in conceiving a project, set up business in a new country, group discussions in which management should look in and beyond for perspective, manager expectations for telework, fashion web site, blogging and time management.
In all, a mixed bag!
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