Top ten and coincidences

I haven't caught up with my HitTail results for a while, so, having had a reminder from them yesterday, I thought I'd check out what's hot in regard to the top ten keywords.  These top ten words are apparently 15.6% of all my search traffic.

HitTail suggests only one phrase as a keyword this week: random film free, a rather odd phrase, you'd think.  But apparently people have picked this blog up as a result. I tried it, and this blog didn't get listed until the third page - admittedly there were only ten results per page, so that's probably not bad.

Apart from that, and the fact that putting in random film free might not have helped the searcher a great deal when he or she came across my blog, here are the top ten results.  Nine of them are old favourites; only one is a bit out of left field, and that's number four on the list, which comes up as googleads.g.doubleclick.net.  Now I can't imagine anyone putting that in as a search, so it's plainly something a machine has done.  Good luck to it; when I put it in as a search I get the brush-off from Google.  

Zirka Circus review tops the list this time around, with Zirka Circus coming second.  I must be one of the few people to have written about the Zirka Circus, which is why I'm so popular!

Athlete's hand comes third, and bingo! Mike Crowl comes fifth.  The Great Divorce notes comes sixth - people still picking up something I wrote about C S Lewis' Great Divorce at some point and Google matching it up with the title of my blog.  Chrissy Popadics is, as always, on the list, followed by Frederick Buechner marriage.  Penultimately there's James Berardinelli, whom I haven't written about for more months than there are in a year, and probably longer; in fact, I haven't even read much of Berardinelli in the same time.   And finally there's another old favourite: skinny tie (skinny ties is thirteenth on the list.)  It's interesting that the image for the skinny ties post and a photo of Berardinelli appear in the 'Popular Posts' list down the right hand column.  Zirka Circus is there too, and Buechner, so I guess these are there because there are so many searches for them.  Chrissy Popadics appears under her married name of Johnson in this list.  It's kind of a circle really, isn't it?  People search for the thing so the posts become popular, and the popular posts get searched.  Hmm.  

That's just my top ten list, of course.  The list goes on forever, whittling its way down from nearly 300 hits for each search item to just one.  HitTail's reason for existing is to point out the little words that people search for so that you can make more of these; it's the counter approach to the way most SOEs work.  I could look up all these little words, but I thought I'd stick to a simpler task and check out what words or phrases have been searched for today that brought the searcher in touch with my blog.  There are four: betty boop on stage, oscar wilde on art, into the open air sheet music, charles horton cooley.  Charles Horton Who?  

I didn't think I'd ever written about this bloke, but I have.  Considering that I don't appear anywhere near the top on the search results it's surprising anyone found this site, and it's surprising that HitTail says they did.  But there you go.  I remember writing about Betty Boop, but again she doesn't appear in the search results unless I put some connector, like mike crowl.  

The Oscar Wilde reference is there, again requiring some additional input, but into the open air sheet music turns up easily without additional words; fourth on the list, in fact.  And here's a nice coincidence.  Years ago I wrote a post on Boise, which happened to mention Chrissy Popadics.  Boise doesn't turn up in my HitTail results very readily, but Chrissy does all the time.  The coincidence is that my daughter-in-law comes from Boise, and now lives in Minneapolis with my son.  The post that turns up in relation to open air sheet music tells me that the sheet music in question - painted onto a building - is in Minneapolis.