I have been noticing for a while now that this website is on the first page for a wide variety of Search results, especially on Google. I thought I would post some of those searches here and also tick off some other stats about the site while I am at it. Skip this post if unabashed self-advertising is not your thing. ;)

Stats

• New Visitors Since 11/14/06: 7843
• Pageloads Since 11/14/06: 12,923
• Most common browser: 73.31% IE6 and IE7 (Why?!?! Switch to Firefox!
• Average Daily Pageloads: 66
• Month with the most traffic: April (Hmm... might have something to do with Pesach...)
  
• Interesting Recent Countries: Pakistan, Australia, Venezuela
• Visit Length: Most people get scared off pretty quickly...
  
  (out of the last 420 people to drop by)
• Most Popular Pages:
  • Master Links
  • Photos
  • Glossary
  • Hechsherim
  • Real Messianic Judaism

High-ranking search results

Some of these are searches people have used recently when finding the site, and some are searches that I have done just out of curiosity.

• fringe christians - Google Canada - #4
• reasons judaism is real - AOL search powered by Google - #1
• origination of the Hebrews - Yahoo! España - #2
• issues of kashrut regarding milk - Google - #7
• Messianic Judaism anti Christian - Google UK - #7
• four questions in hebrew - Google - #1
• torat hashlichim - Google - #1
• meshuval - Google - #3

Conclusion

"How do you get so many visitors and high-ranking search hits?" you may ask. Frankly, I don't know. I think that the biggest factors are:

1. Content, Content, and more Content: I spent a lot of time putting togther the Glossary, Links, and Hechsherim pages, and those have contributed substantially to the draw. My photo albums are also popular.
2. Clean code: Remember, a robot program reads your website and tries to gather information. If it cannot figure out what you have, your rankings will be lower. This site is compliant to XHTML Strict standards and uses CSS for formatting. I firmly believe that helps tremendously.
3. Word commonality: Lots of people come here looking for the four Pesach questions. The other four questions are not so commonly known...

Update: I have been asked to add a reference on this post to how many people use the Opera browser to visit The Four Questions. As I suspected, Nick, you are the only one. Standing all alone on top of a lonely mountain. Even the Safari users have you beat seven to one. So, does the site look okay in Opera? If so, I should probably add their logo to my homepage.

Labels: Personal, Technology