What are you really writing about?

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.