Several folks I admire online, particularly Digital Ambler and Magic of the Ordinary (Hello, Peregrin!) have recently done an analysis of the common search terms that help people find their blog.  They got particularly interesting results, partly because they write such interesting blogs.  So I figured, hey, how do people find my blog??

The answers are neither surprising nor particularly interesting, really.

“Memory Palace” and related terms accounted for a substantial percentage of all of the searches.  People wanted exercises to practice, or memory palaces to memorize, or frameworks for study, or ideas about to construct them. All of my memory palace articles are here in one spot, and curiously enough, this is also the page most frequently reached by these searches.

“Winter Solstice Poem” became the single most searched item on this blog ever.  December 2013 turned into the month with the most visits since this blog opened on WordPress in 2009.  The Poem for the Winter Solstice was big this year, and the one from a few years ago not far behind.  More than 1000 people visited this blog on December 20, 2013, and hundreds more during the days immediately before and after the winter solstice.  And not a single card, letter, comment or like.  You might like to know that there’s a broad collection of other pagan poetry, including “pagan poems“, “solar poems” “moon poems” or “lunar poems” and suchlike. Maybe some of you visitors might like them; they deal with similar themes.

“How to Draw the Tree of Life” has been a subject of some of my geometrical play.  Here’s a link to some of the relevant processes, and there’s also a bunch of photos on my Flickr account.

“Andrew Watt Blog” accounts for a surprising number of hits on this blog. Apparently lots of people can’t find it without a Google search ahead of time.  The address, by the way, is “Andrewbwatt.com” or “andrewbwatt.wordpress.com”

“The Horse May Talk” also accounts for a surprising number of hits on this blog in the past year.  Like, dozens at least, in various forms (“the horse may talk” “the horse might talk”, “the horse talks” and so on. As might be expected, these are all related to the story of Nasruddin, the Sufi fool-figure in islamic secular literature.  Apparently I’m one of the few versions of the story online.

The next four things that people asked for were “American history research questions” and “First Decan Aquarius” and the “constitution scavenger hunt“, and “second decan Libra.”  And I guess this is what people are looking for when they come to my blog.

I guess I’m going to have to write about weirder things moving forward, if I want random folks to find my blog and start reading.  In the meantime, all this blog post is doing is making it easier for people to find the stuff that they’re already coming to my blog to find?  Seems like a sort of bass-ackwards way of doing things, when you come down to it.

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