What are visitors searching when they find your site?

[sjwinslow]

Since my traffic has increased to a reasonable level lately I've been looking at the words people are using in search engines when they find my site. My site's rank is still low enough that most of the time when someone lands on my site from a search engine I see they have entered a multi-word phrase. I was wondering if anyone would be willing to share some of the phrases they have seen frequently so we can all improve our visibility to the searching public.

Here are some of the phrases I see frequently:

[surname] family

[surname] genealogy

[surname] crest

[surname] coat of arms

[surname] family tree

[firstname] [lastname] [date]

[firstname] [lastname] [spousefirstname] [spouselastname]

Thanks in advance for sharing,

Steve

[tmaguirre]

Steve, I see all of the ones you have listed, with the exception of the crest/coat of arms. I also seem to have quite a bit related to churches, cemetaries, headstones, etc. These phrases have come up more than once, and have resulted in the individual viewing multiple pages on the site, not just a 'hit and run.'

[NAME] mausoleum

[COUNTY] county cemeteries

[COUNTY] catholic cemetery

headstones for [COUNTY] cemeteries

[COUNTY] census

[sURNAME] [COUNTRY]

[sURNAME] geneology [sTATE]

[COUNTY] plat map

[theKiwi]

From an Analog run on my log file

This report lists which queries people used in search engines to find the site.

Listing the top 20 queries by the number of requests, sorted by the number of requests.

#reqs: search term

-----: -----------

67: cache:8elblv6ywtoj:roger.lisaandroger.com/browsephotos100.php hoardweel

66: certificate of attendance

34: hoardweel farm

30: cache:8elblv6ywtoj:roger.lisaandroger.com/browsephotos100.php ewan caldwell nz

30: robert moffat

28: bringans

27: roger moffat

25: dunse scotland

25: john stoddart

25: lisa and roger moffat

24: roger and lisa moffat

24: shiell genealogy

23: houliston

23: george moffat

23: jim mackay mataura new zealand

22: cache:p53m0vkg9xuj:roger.lisaandroger.com/surnames all.php?tree=roger demperston duncanson

20: hoardweel

20: sharon prendeville

20: oldhamstocks

19: james dewar

7192: [not listed: 3,280 search terms]

and

This report lists which words people used in search engines to find the site.

Listing the top 20 query words by the number of requests, sorted by the number of requests.

#reqs: search term

-----: -----------

553: genealogy

455: moffat

439: scotland

283: family

266: of

226: john

217: william

210: dewar

204: houliston

191: new

191: zealand

177: robert

164: roger

156: nz

147: otago

141: and

136: hoardweel

136: james

126: berwickshire

123: surname

15529: [not listed: 2,507 search terms]

Roger

[Rush]

Right now, I get about 10 hits from google a month...

(No need to rehash that whole issue in this thread)

Yahoo / MSN drives most of my hits, but still wouldn't be a good sampling.

Rush

[sjwinslow]

theKiwi,

Interesting about the searches on the churches and cemeteries. I don't have that type of information on my site so it makes sense that I'm not seeing any searches for it. As a long term project that may be an area that I'll look into.

Steve

[sjwinslow]

I wanted to share an observation and see if anyone else has seen something similar. I made a relative significant change to the structure of my site on May 23rd. I included all the surnames on my home page and add a new page called find.php (a modified search.php) to display all people on my site, one click away from the homepage.

Prior to making this change I had been tracking what Google sitemaps indicated were the top 20 common words Google bot saw on my site. These words were:

winslow, genealogy, ancestry, heritage, events, location, plymouth, family, john, massachusetts, search, children, dna, mary, married, records, equals, new, thomas, born

Although, not very descriptive of the content of my site, most of these words make sense as the first 4 I force on the site through some changes I made. Some of the others are from common contents in the database like: plymouth, john, massachusetts, etc. Then there are the ones that are words I call template words that TNG uses to label fields and links like: events, location, search, children, married, records, equals, new, born.

Before making the change to include the find.php page the list of words and their order were consistent. Soon after making the change the list changed to the following:

search, name, events, location, winslow, print, genealogy, massachusetts, ancestry, plymouth, heritage, family, new, abt, born, documents, faqs, dates, database, anonymous

You will now notice the the 4 words I tried to ensure are included are still include in the list but they are much farther down the list. The first 4 positions are now replaced with template words search, name, events, location. Also the number of template words have increased from 9 to 13 out of 20 and the number of common words from my database only include massachusetts and plymouth.

Some of this makes sense because before making the changes Google only listed about 150 total pages for my site. After the changes, there are over 22,000 pages listed for my site. Most of the new pages at this point are the new find.php pages. The words that are common to the find.php pages and the top 20 words the sitemap indicates are:

search, name, print, winslow, genealogy, ancestry, heritage & faq

There are a number of words now in the list that I can't locate (at least in any quantity) like database & anonymous and others that can be seen on the site but why did the change being them to the front when they are not on the find.php pages e.g., documents, & dates?

Overall, I'm concerned that the common words Google sees on my site (other than the ones I forced to be included i.e., winslow, genealogy, ancestry, heritage) have little or nothing to do with what my site is about.

Steve