Search Engine Land Stats: December 2006 Preview

I’ve been trained from internet birth that site stats are a precious thing,
never to be shared. Well, not trained, but somehow I got it in my head. It’s
somewhat silly, given that any site that carries advertising often reveals this
information in their media kit anyway. With Search Engine Land being all new, a
virtual restart for me, I thought it would be fun to share site stats on the
site each month, to talk about how it hopefully grows. I’ll do this at the
beginning of each month, to cover the previous one. But I wanted to share a
little bit now.

The time period covers December 1 through 10, before we officially launched.
We had some stories up, and some traffic, but I imagine the entire month of
December will look much different.

Over the 10 days (including two weekends), we’ve had about 30,000 page views.
That’s an average of 3,000 page views per day. We’ve had about 15,000 visits,
about 1,500 per day. Thanks for coming by!

As a marketer, I always find referrer information far more fun than visits
and page views. Over the period, we had just over 10,000 visits come from
referral links:

The biggest difference between the referral traffic I see here and what I saw
over at Search Engine Watch is that here, it remains mostly feed driven. Google
was a huge driver of SEW traffic. But that was keyword driven, and especially
Google News driven. I did a post on Daggle last month,
Case Study: Digg Versus Google
News Traffic, that gives you a glimpse of that. At Search Engine Land,
Google referral traffic (where someone clicks on a link from Google) is far
above keyword driven traffic. I’ll come back to this in a bit.

Readers beyond Google are also important. Bloglines is a huge powerhouse,
above a place like My Yahoo. That might change when I do some formal submissions
to My Yahoo. If you’re seeded as a default choice in My Yahoo, tons of traffic
flow. I’ll blog more about this and the entire promotion process I’ll be going
through for Search Engine Land. Also a call out to reader Netvibes for kicking
us traffic!

As a brand new site, it helps to have friends get you going. My alma mater
Search Engine Watch remains the biggest friend, in terms of traffic sent our
way. Threadwatch — I remember when it was just a baby itself — is now a
referral powerhouse. Rand Fishkin’s SEOmoz has pushed us love, as has John
Battelle at SearchBlog, Philipp Lenssen’s Google Blogoscoped, Dave Winer’s
Scripting News, the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog, Robert Clough and
Jennifer Laycock’s Search Engine Guide, Loren Baker’s Search Engine Journal and
Gary Price’s ResourceShelf. Thanks, everyone! We hope to send you it all back
and more in the months to come!

A brand new site also benefits if you have other sites that are more mature.
My personal blog, my personal consulting site and Barry Schwartz’s Search Engine
Roundtable have all contributed. Even the brand new site for Search Engine
Land’s publisher, Third Door Media, kicked in some traffic.

I mentioned Google News. We’re not in there yet. I haven’t formally submitted
and don’t plan to until later this month, as I will with the other news search
engines. I think there are pretty good odds we’ll naturally get added. But we’re
brand new, so a period of proving ourselves before allowed into the select group
of news sources is totally understandable.

Over at news site Techmeme, Gabe Rivera wasted no time having faith in us.
Thanks, Gabe! We were listed there I think as soon as we started posting
content, making Techmeme our biggest news search engine traffic source at the
moment. Want to be in Techmeme yourself? Gabe gave tips in his
How do I get my blog
to show up? post that you should check out.

If I love referral data, I love search query data even more. What terms are
people using to find the site! It’s really, really sad:

So sad. I’m used to a huge, diverse query stream ranging from lots of traffic
for a topic currently in the news to lots of traffic for terms relating to
standing content about meta tags or, hmm — search engines. My query stream here
is pathetic. We rank for our name!

If I’m doing my job, that’s going to change drastically over the coming
months. Our new site should grow to be trusted in the search engines, if we’re
getting out quality content that attracts links. Plus, each new article is a new
entry point, giving us a longer tail of possible terms to connect on. In fact,
beyond what’s shown above, there were about 200 other terms that all drove us
traffic. The tail can be very powerful.

FYI, it’s Google that’s our big driver of search-related traffic. Google sent
about 800 visits via search terms in the period above, compared to that 1,229
that came off of Google feed reading related links. In comparison, Ask.com sent
us 40 search-related visits, then Yahoo 37 visits, AOL 5 and MSN 2.

Hope you enjoyed the glimpse! Let’s see how it looks when the entire month
finishes. I want a happy query stream that makes me smile!