Booty Clickin

Alternate title: Drawing More People To Your Blog.

I love statistics. Not just because I took stats classes in grad school and feel compelled to make something useful out of the experience.

I enjoy looking at trends and taking numbers apart.

So I like fiddling with my web stats to see what's there.

One of my favorite queries is to find out what people were searching for when they found me. See You are Who Google Says You Are.

In the true early days of the web (1993-1994), search engines didn't search. You submitted your pages and the engines either indexed them or not.

In those days, the evil porno kings started finding ways to trick the indexes. So, for example, they would enter thousands of words at the bottom of a landing page and make them the same color as the background. It looked blank to a human, but machines saw, and indexed, all the text.

And then the innocent searcher "found" this page by accident. Didn't matter what you searched for. "Left-handed lug nut 64 chrysler." Result: www.cousinlarrysprettygoodporn.com.

Now search engines try to stop all that.

And, truth be told, most of us don't want irrelevant results. When I'm searching for copy editing, I don't want porn or home loans. In fact, I don't even want copy machines or term paper editing. And that's where it gets tough for the search engines.

Now comes the art of creating interesting titles for your blog post.

Last year I posted a report on the Microsoft's small biz day entitled WPC Small Biz Symposium Kicks Booty. Immediately, I started getting searches for big booty and small booty.

Then I posted an item called Indian Tech Support Kicks Booty. Now I get people searching for Indian booty.

I'm Confused

I understand interrupt advertising. I understand that, by whatever means a link shows up in front of someone's face, they might click on it.

But I don't understand why someone looking for booty (small, large, Indian, or a few other variations not discussed here) would click on my link.

It's not like the link says "Enlarge your body parts with good consulting practices." It clearly says WPC Small Biz Symposium Kicks Booty.

What possesses a booty-seeker to click on an article about a business symposium?

I'm happy to have the traffic. I hope they buy a book on project management or selling managed services.

But I just don't get it.