Dear Internet,
As I formulate my perseverance, I’m opting to take some online classes to keep my skills flush in a variety of fields. As I have an interest in SEO (search engine optimization) from my days in library school when we were mapping data sets and taxonomies, this seems like a good place as any to start. If you’re interested, Udemy offers a couple of free courses (Moz.com’s SEO Training Course and Advance SEO: Tactics and Strategy) that I found useful and I’m going to apply some of the strategies here on EPbaB to see how they work.
I’ve been curious as to how people find me other than direct links from across social media. Now that Google (at least) shields keywords if you’re logged in, the data I have is actually very little. I use three different analytics software on the site (Google Analytics, WordPress JetPack Stats, and StatCounter), while there is some variation of what is coming up, it’s been pretty agreeable across the board.
And oh! A couple of things about searching: If you’re logged into Google (which, it seems, 90% of us are), your searches are influenced by what you searched with before. If you search for “lisa rabey” (quotes or othewise), Google’s results will change depending how you searched for that thing (or related thing) in the past. Additionally, if you’re logged into Google when you search, and land on my page by using keywords, I won’t see those keywords in my stats. Those will be shielded. Also! If you use a URL blocker, like donotlink.com, I also won’t see that reference.
Hence why what I’m getting back in data is tiny. So there.
Lastly, if you want untainted results, use any browsers incognito mode an search, not logged in, for that item. In incognito mode, your history is not tracked or kept thus it sill be a fresh search each time. I would teach this trick to my info lit students by having them log into Google, pop open an incognito window, then search for the same thing in both windows. Sometimes the results will only vary a bit and others, a lot.
As a mini-project, I’m going to put together top five keywords and top five pages and see how they stack against the other.
Top 5 Keywords
Top 5 Pages
- Home page
- Apology for team harpy (now pulled)
- ALA code of conduct
- Live action Sexual Harassment
- Hello
Analysis
Exit Pursued by a Bear (no comma) matches with the top page. This is blatantly obvious as keyword will drop you my landing page. Tada! The name refers to a stage direction from Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, which came out of nowhere in the play. It’s also the name of an acting group, a band, a TV trop, and a play in addition to my website. Other variations of the keyword popping up includes the same phrase with the comma, “exit pursued bear,” “pursued by a bear,” and “exitpursuedbyabear.” (Quotes not withstanding.)
Lisa Rabey searches are ubiquitous to me though I have it on good authority there are two more of us (possibly three) in the world. Quotes or no quotes, you will find at least one of my three sites (this one, lisa.rabey.net (librarian professional) and lisarabey.com (writing professional)) will come up in the top five results. This accounts for traffic being driven to my landing page AND to my about page.
Live sexual harassment search is interesting to me because, who the hell is searching for those keywords? Actually, it could be from any numerous contributors such as people looking for data stats. This search links to Live action Sexual Harassment, which is a write up I did right after I was sexually harassed at a conference where I was on a panel talking about it, you guessed it, sexual harassment in the workplace. Oh, the irony.
Queen pussy is also interesting one to me as it is in the top 5 keyword search and I’m wondering what people are searching for exactly. Like Pussy, Queen of the Pirates maybe? I am not sure but what it does is bring the entry, Queen of the Pussy Posse. QofPP is an entry I wrote after I published widely a piece on ALA’s Code of Conduct. Someone thought the name thrown at me would be derogatory. The answer is — nope. So while this is a top five keyword, the page does not show up as a top five page, which is intriguing.
Saint Lisa makes me giggle because there is no saint lisa, st. or otherwise. All the variations land you to an old entry from 12 years ago, St. Lisa: Patron saint of tattoos, piercings, fags and married men, in which I discourse on my friends from theology class, Matt and AQPaul. What becomes amusing about these keywords is that the page is number 25 on the list of top pages for my site and is the only set of keywords that do not align to the corresponding top 5 pages.
Other things that I know are: Pages with lists or how-tos do really well on my site. The more I write, regardless of content, generates more page views than when I take breaks (this one is seemingly pretty obvious). I get a lot of private comments on the personal stuff and public comments on the how-tos and lists.
There is a lot more to SEO than what I’ve laid out here and will discourse more at another time.
xoxo,
Lisa
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