HOEI

Today I am in an acronym creating mood. My first term of the day is called search landing information (SLI). Ultimately, SLI is what you use to improve your SEO. The SLI can be defined as a combination of:

1. The search word(s) used in a search engine that results with a person landing on your blog or web site.
2. The search engine used.
3. The visitors activity on your site.

When you host your own stand alone blog, you can see these specific statistics from a standard (free) Site Meter account. That is if your statistics are not whizzing by and cycling out of your view at light speed due to having a gazzillion visitors per minute. Even if you re seeing your stats disappear rapidly on Site Meter, you can still get a pretty good snap shoot in time. The visit details page Site Meter will give you all of this and more. You can also us free log analyzers against your raw domain data to gain information on common search words used to get to your site. Tools like webalizer and modlogan give fairly good results and offer much more than you can ever get come a tool like Site Meter. Don’t get me wrong, Site Meter is one of the greatest things since sliced bread, but it falls short on telling you how many people hit your feeds and how many people are pulling down you MP3s via iTunes if your into podcasting.

The inspiration for this post came from my reflection of my own statistics addiction after reading Help! I’m Addicted to Checking My Blog Stats. Don’t let Darren fool you with his “I remember doing the same thing…” spill. Go back a few weeks and take a close look at the graphic in Darren’s post titled A Secret To My Productivity Success. Out of the first fifteen sites Darren launches every morning, Site Meter statistics make up one third of them. I can imaging that his Site Meter stats whiz by at light speed.

Anyway, let’s face it. We must understand who we have visiting our blogs and why if we want to grow traffic? If your blog stats are anything like mine, then about 60% of your traffic is comprised of new visits. Google Analytics offers some great information about new vs. returning visitors. If you consider that 50% of my traffic comes from search engines, then we can conclude that about 30% of my blogs’ visitors are first timers coming from search engines. Of the visitors to my site I get many more page views from search engine deliveries. What the heck, let’s start another acronym out of that one. We will refer to these mortal visitors who land on our blogs for the first time from a search engine as a SED (Search Engine Delivery).

A SED is the backbone of growing blogs. This is where the fresh meat is coming from that you are hoping you can cook up with your FeedBurner. It should come as not surprise that the things your are most passionate about are going to be the things that bring in the most traffic. The number one search term landing people on this domain is “caden”. This domain continues to rack number one for searches on the name Caden on a regular basis in Google and Yahoo! with visitors landing on Caden’s Page which is one of multiple blogs on this single domain. Another notable is “goggle earth” which originally happened by a spelling mistake on an alt tag in my Tech Land blog. I also get my fair share of hits on a simple little Grill’n Time post for steak grilling temperature.

My favorite search word(s) to land a SED here in recent weeks was for “his foot up to his head”. The SLI shows that the SED landed on a post containing a picture of my son scratching his head with his toes.

Now, what do you think of those new acronyms?