Who comes here? From where? And Why?

Like many other bloggers (genealogy or otherwise), I started to write up something about the “most popular” blog posts for 2011. However, after checking with Google Analytics and seeing only ONE post that was written in 2011 show up on the list in the “top 25” for the entire year, said to heck (well, maybe something a little stronger) with it.

But then I realized the results from Google Analytics only includes actual “visitors” that come to the blog - from referrals by other bloggers/websites or from search engines. Most times the latter ones (from search engines) don't stay very long, sometimes merely seconds. I imagine that the vast majority of people who actually read the blog are using some kind of feed reader. That's true for me, I generally only actually visit a blog to leave a comment.

I also don't think the number of comments a blog post gets means it is more popular or better liked than another. So I came to the conclusion that there really is not a good or easy way of saying what is “most popular” or “most liked” or “most read” or “most whatever” but that's just my opinion. I could be wrong. That actually has happened once or twice before ;-)

Then I decided to see where actual visitors to the blog come from. No real surprise there. Most come through Google. But also from Bing, Yahoo, Networked Blogs, and Alltop. There were, however, five blogs that showed up near the top of that list of “traffic sources” that sent quite a few readers my way: Genea-Musings, Shades of the Departed, Reflections from the Fence, Greta's Genealogy Bog, and Creative Gene (Thank you very much Randy, fM, Carol, Greta, and Jasia).

The next question that came to mind is: What brings people to kinexxions? I've been blogging for nearly five years, have published more than 1200 posts covering my family research as well as 2+ years of travels so I was curious about why people came here. Unlike Amy at The We Tree Genealogy Blog, I don't get a lot of strange or funny search terms.

I've taken the first 50 keywords shown in Google Analytics for kinexxions and separated them into three “top 10” lists. These are the search terms that brought the most people here in the year 2011... Rather than link to specific posts, I'll take the “easy” way out and, if you are interested, let you use the “Google Search” bar in the upper-right corner of the blog to see what comes up!

Top Ten People Keywords – This is where I get really, really frustrated. All of these people are ancestors of mine. And I wasn't contacted by anyone who landed on the blog this year that used these terms!! Why not?

1. samuel bray
2. john casper stoever
3. william p wise
4. johann nicolas schuder
5. indiana stemm
6. phend
7. goodrich family
8. joseph joslin, jr.
9. kate berlin richmond
10. any new family history on conrad helms?

Top Ten Travel Keywords

1. the shoe tree nevada
2. moro rock
3. caddo lake
4. georgia guidestones
5. battle of little bighorn
6. balcony house mesa verde
7. walter's wiggles angels landing
8. wheat fields of eastern washington
9. chilkoot river bears
10. sawyer glacier

Top Ten Other Keywords

1. becky wiseman (The number 1 search term, overall, that brings visitors here!)
2. kinexxions (Number 5 search term overall)
3. summary of evidence example
4. hebron lutheran church
5. digitize slides
6. slides to cd walmart
7. armenian ancestors
8. how to pronounce tahquamenon
9. ancestors family genealogy tree blogspot
10. tickle my funny bone

Well, that was interesting. Or was it?