I NEED MORE DATA

In my past life I used to live in a cubicle.  I worked for the leading SEO company in the country before companies like Google were big.  We were a room full of recent college graduates that spent hours in front of computer monitors and in server rooms pouring over data.  We worked with almost any company you could think of.  Our goal was to get these companies better rankings in the search engines to make them more visible to potential customers.  We would take huge spreadsheet files to determine what words customers were using in their searches to arrive on sellers web pages.  We also created our own web pages for companies to "coax" customers to the pages wanted.  These weren't the annoying pop up pages, but legitimate pages that lived in cyberspace that tried to anticipate any keyword search a customer would use for a particular product.  In the end it was win win, since customers found the products they wanted and companies made sales.

With blogs, you are able to see data for visitors.  No, don't get all freaked out that big brother is watching you.  The data that shows up is non identifying.  Was does intrigue me is seeing what pages send people to my blog.  Most are bike related, others are social network linked.  I also love seeing where users are located.  You have probably noticed the IP map up in the right hand side of my page.  True, most of my visitors are from the South East, but recently I have been getting hits from the UK and Russia.  I guess it's kind of the feeling I got when I collected stamps (yeah, yeah, computer science degree, stamp collecting, I'm a big dork).  It's cool to travel the world without leaving the house.  Sort of liking having anonymous pen pals.  Keyword searches still entertain me to no end.  I often wonder how a person ended up on my page when searching for "ballerina", or "camel toe".  Still, I have to admit that I like the control I have over this page, way more than the free for all cluster that is Facebook.  Sure it's mostly strangers that end up here, but hopefully they are entertained for a bit.