And what do searchers actually find?
There’s all sorts of ways to analyse your blog content, traffic, search engine referrals and so on. Lots of them are terribly serious. Spreadsheets. Software. I daresay you can draw graphs.
This isn’t serious at all. And I’m sorry, blogspot users, part of it is wordpress focussed, though I daresay you could tweak the methods for your own purposes.
So first of all – what do *you* think you’re writing about? I analysed this by looking at the tags I put on posts (labels in blogspot terms), so I installed a tag cloud widget/plugin (that’s the wordpress bit). The widget should be showing down at the bottom of my sidebar right at the moment, but I also took a screenshot, so that I could put it directly in the blog post.
Here you go.
Not completely what I expected, to be honest, but then again, I didn’t select over the last year or so, and I *do* have 12 years of archives which are on very different topics to my current interests. I’ll try redoing it on a more recent span to match the other clouds I’m going to share, as they are both based on rather more recent timescales. (The plugin claims to be configurable, but it might require coding, and it’s kind of late at night for that kind of thing 😉 )
The next analysis is via Tagxedo which takes a variety of input – I gave it my blog feed. So it’s looking at the text from my last ten posts to give you this version – ie what I’m really writing about, rather than what I’m labelling it as. (You could do this from any site that supports an RSS feed – that’s the thing you use to power things like bloglovin.)
Ah yes. Parenting. Children, books, reading. I suppose it’s obvious those are my most used words, and also I guess they don’t really to be in my tags if they’re in my content that much 🙂
And the final analysis?
This is a tag cloud version of the keywords from my google analytics account. There’s a big caveat with this – far and away the largest percent of my keywords aren’t disclosed to me, as google doesn’t give any information on keywords from users who are logged in. Having said that though, I think this is kind of fascinating. (If you’re wondering how I did it, I followed the instructions here and tweaked them a bit for the updates in analytics since it was written.)
So, basically, most people find my blog by searching either directly for it (live otherwise, making it up) or by looking for help with their Mazda. Seriously, look how many of those search terms include the word Mazda. Thta’s all down to my rants about the problems we had with the DPF on our car. (You can read the full post here if you desperately want to.) I can also tell this by looking at my traffic day to day – the Mazda post gets visitors Every. Single. Day. Which is a bit depressing, when I think about all the things I’ve written that are oh so carefully crafted and designed for readers. Do they get readers? yeah, a few. But nothing like that rant about the car.
What do you think you write about then? And what does google send your way? I’d love to hear if you fancy trying any tag cloud analysis on your blot.
sacha says
This is a great post. I’m interesting in checking what I’m posting about as well. Thanks for sharing.
Jax Blunt says
No problem, hope you enjoy the process.
Emma says
I like this, something about word clouds makes me happy! I get very few visitors to my blog so won’t be doing this yet, but I like Tagxedo though and used it to make a word cloud canvas for my living room to remind me on difficult days why I’m doing what I’m doing. I’ve just gone back on there to have another play.
Jax Blunt says
Yes, they’re fun aren’t they? I quite like the idea of a word cloud canvas, thanks!
Amruta from Green Living in Dubai says
Nice post! Similar thing happened to me when I tried to check on google analytics. I write about sustainability so I considered those words will be fetching people to my blog. But then I just decided to overlook this and keep on writing what I want to write. Though people come to my blog through unexpected keywords, they definitely end up reading about sustainability and my awareness goal is achieved so far!
Have great day!
Jax Blunt says
Good way of looking at it Amruta, thanks for taking the time to comment.
Mich says
Laffed at the last word used. So rude about my blog!
Jax Blunt says
Tut! Poor old blog.
boyschooling says
I tried with Tagxedo, but it needs a Silverlight plug-in and doesn’t work on Chrome, so I found an alternative that’s super easy here: http://timdream.org/wordcloud/ No plug-in, just type your blogger username (or Word Press or whatever), and it makes a lovely cloud. You can alter the word choices (so I removed my 350 references to “my”), and change shape, colour, etc. Really easy, but I’m so glad you gave me the idea to do this kind of analysis. Revealing!
Jax Blunt says
Ooh, I’ll take a look at that, thanks. It’s rather fun isn’t it?
Stephanie Jane says
Thanks for the word cloud link boyschooling. Mine’s a pretty eye-shaped cloud. Apparently I say ‘so’ far too often though. And ‘apparently’!
Jax Blunt says
Giggle. I think the tagxedo tool takes out that kind of common word, must give the other one a go.
susankmann says
This is really interesting, thanks for sharing. Will have to have a look at mine x
Jax Blunt says
Love to see your results!