Sunday Silliness: SEO and Super Mario

I didn't even have a lot of time to celebrate hitting my 400th follower, because all of a sudden I blinked and was at 403.  This latest milestone made me smile.

A few people ask how I do it.  Simple, I network, and I make sure my blog can easily be found.

I have had dozens find me through google alone.  If you look at my traffic referrals, google is easily my overall #1 source.

One thing that helps a lot are my images.  I make sure to name my image files with clear and easy to find names now.   It took me a while to start doing this.  If you look at my first post, the image files are names 'images' or 'idaho2newlarger.jpeg.'  Not exactly things people search for.

Now, if people look for Charlie Sheen pictures with his army of assassins, or funny meth pictures, or 'derp' faces, I'm there.  Taco trucks, dj's, evil kittehs, I'm there.  And every little bit helps. If you look at more recent stats, you can see specific images that people find, and the broad keyword searches they use to find me.

To my first 400+, I thank you.  I look forward to growing with you, and hope to grow to 1,000 and beyond with your support.

Almost as an afterthought, here is the mandatory goofiness for the weekend.  The song seems appropriate, and this vid combines one of my favorite bands with one of my favorite video games.  Enjoy the show!

Thanks again.  Much love.

What I Have Learned From 1.5 Weeks of Blogging

I decided to make a blog because I had an interesting story to tell, and I was currently unemployed.  It gave me something to do, and quickly became a fun little outlet to vent.

I have been doing it for about a week and a half, and I have learned a lot.

One of the places I gather my knowledge is the 'stats' page on the blogger dashboard...

This shows me data of who is reading my blog, where they are, and what they use to read it.  The blog has started out with friends and family only (shameless facebook plugging) but has escalated from there.

The first section I want to talk about is the geographic area:

It's an American blog, and most of my friends are from the US, so that's where the majority of my readers are.  But I have also branched out across the Atlantic, which is exciting for me.  Ho, Spain!  Ho, Greece!  Ho, Germany and the rest of you!  The fact I get comments from a broad spectrum of viewers is also interesting, because I love hearing about others' points of view.  To quote a horrid Disney song, it's a small world after all!

Next are the browsers.  Firefox seems to be the weapon of choice, but I noticed "Iron" was a hefty 7%, higher than IE.  I have never heard of iron, so I checked it out.  It's a variation of Chrome, without all the 'google' bits inside.  Probably less stat tracking and history reporting too.  So if you like Chrome but hate Big Brother, Iron is for you.  You can see for yourself on this link.  If it's in German, and you don't speak it, there are translators on the top-right corner.

Last are operating systems.  WTF?  I'm being viewed more on Blackberries than on Macs and iPhones combined?  This baffled me, since Droids and iPhones are becoming so popular.  I have a Blackberry myself (not for very much longer) but thought of BB's as dinosaurs on their way to extinction...

Anyway, these are my insights for now.  I look forward to the further education my blog will reveal to me, and hopefully I can provide some fun insights to my followers as well.   Cheers!