Looking glass: search keywords

I've been meaning to post some analysis data on the traffic that drives my site for a while now but never get around to it. This is first in a series of posts which looks at what people have been reading on my site, what works and what doesn't. This data has been gleaned from Google Analytics with the following caveats:

• there was no monitoring for most of 2005–2006
• there is no data for at least half of 2006–2007

So really the only solid data set is from 2007–2008. Nevertheless, some data is better than no data so I'm looking at it anyways. Finally, I will also try to correlate this with the top keywords as reported by Wordpress Stats and AWStats to see how well they match. Without further ado, here are the top ten searched keywords for the past three years:

Clearly my posts on Airtel's Call Home service stole the show in 2006–2007. It remains a strong contender the next year as well. However, in 2007, almost everything else was completely drowned out by my Quixstar/BWW post. What I'm not showing here, however, is by how much do the ranks differ. Suffice to say that the number of hits on the Quixstar post far outnumbered the number of hits on everything else put together pretty much.

There don't seem to be any surprises here either. I'm not sure if I should feel good or bad about it. The hope is that by taking stock of these keywords, I can get a better sense of exactly what is it that people come to this site for. Not that I'm writing for an “audience” per se, but there's no harm in writing what people actually like to read As I said before, I'll try to follow up with some more stats soon.