Key Words and Key Phrases

Speaking of targeted traffic, if you want to know what people are searching for
in those search engines, look no further than the Keywords and Keyphrases

These search terms are bringing visitors to your site. Unless you’re an 800-
pound gorilla yourself, the Keywords table won’t mean a whole lot, except
that having your best keywords appear the most is desirable. See how “figure”
appears 5,586 times and “skating” clocks in at 6,128, but “figure skating”
brings in only 135? That’s what we mean. SkateFic is ranked so far down in the
search for “figure skating” that it seldom gets found. The traffic you do see in
the table is actually brought in by AdWords.
For the most part, however, SkateFic’s key-phrase performance is pretty
good. There are only two anomalies (Kristina Lenko and Kristina Cousins),
which bring people in but don’t actually appear anywhere on the site. The rest
of the key phrases are on topic and likely point to relevant content. By clicking
Full List, one would see that “figure skating” appears in roughly half the
searches, meaning people are generally interested in the subject matter
SkateFic offers. This is important. Years ago, the two top searches were “Tina
Wild,” a porn star, and “hockey wives” —don’t ask, we don’t know either.
Obviously, those searches did not bring in people who were interested in what
SkateFic had to offer: a skating serial chapter that mentioned hockey players’
wives and where the main character Tina had a wild-hair day.

Miscellaneous

At present, as shown on Figures 3-18 and 3-19, the only part of the Miscellaneous
table that’s working is the tally of bookmar
The measures of “favorite” bookmarking in the two figures above are
important for at least two reasons. First, they tell you how many people liked
your site enough to bookmark it —meaning that they plan to return again and
again. They may never actually return, but some do. This is called “stickiness.”
You want your site to be sticky. The “favorites” metric helps you keep tabs on
how big your core audience is—the people who intend to come back.
Second, if you follow this over the months, you can see whether your content
is becoming more compelling or less—are more or fewer people intending
to come back? SkateFic.com ran at 4.7 percent bookmarks for the five
years or so before February 2006, as recorded cumulatively in Figure 3-18, Figure
3-19, covering February 2006 to February 2007, shows a big change. Not
only did a healthy 5,749 enter the site during that year, but 2,156 bookmarked
it—37.5 percent compared to the average of 4.7 percent for previous years.
One could explore the reasons for this, but Google Analytics records only
effects; it won’t tell you why. What it does give you are hard numbers showing
that the stickiness of SkateFic.com more than tripled in a year, from 709 to
2,156. The site has gotten stickier, and it’s doing better at attracting an audience
interested in figure-skating fiction.