What are you looking at? (Blog stats)

Around the hills is now one year old and I hope regular readers, and fellow bloggers, will be interested in a few statistics from the first 12 months.  These facts and figures are all taken from the built-in WordPress “My Stats” page.

First of all, a few basic numbers.  This is my 47th post and, at the time of writing, I’ve had 5,279 page hits.  My busiest day was 18th October 2011 when, thanks to Phil adding me to his Doodlecat TGO Challenge index, I had 232 pageviews (Thanks Phil!).  I get the occasional day when nobody visits the blog but, for the first 4 months of 2012, I’ve been getting an average of 16 pageviews per day.

For me, the most interesting (and sometimes baffling) aspect of my blog stats is the search terms that people have used to find the blog.  Lots of searchs have been for obvious TGO Challenge-related subjects such as : “tgo challenge torridon”, “tgo achnashellach” or for places which are popular on the Challenge, like: “red bothy”, “ault na goire” and “glas allt shiel” (with a variety of spellings!)

My local walks have been found by people looking for “the wirral way”, “ellesmere port canal walk” and “hilbre island”.  And, also, by “cement bricks in bridge”, “wierd things” and “canal litter”.

A few of my favourite search terms have been “old man drinking tea”, “rudest signs” and “wellies”, just plain “wellies”, and I can only wonder if the reader was happy with what he or she found!

Since the end of February, WordPress has been telling me which country my readers are in.  Not surprisingly, 80% of pageviews are from people in the UK.  I’ve had hits from another 41 countries, with the highest number coming from the USA, France, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands.  I’ve had readers from Peru, Iceland and Lithuania (but they took one look and never came back!)

WordPress tells me when a reader has followed a link to my blog from another webpage or blog.  Most of these “referrers” are from friends with Blogger/blogspot blogs who have added Around the hills to their blogroll and who automatically publish a link to my new posts.  In my opinion, this would be a great addition to WordPress as I can only currently publish static links to my favourite blogs’ homepage.  I could publish a series of RSS links to the blogs I like to read, but that has been on my to-do list for months and I doubt I’ll get round to it.

A couple of months ago, I set up a Twitter account as an alternative to the blog when I didn’t have web/email access or didn’t have much to say.  All of my blog posts are automatically tweeted and that seems to have brought me a few more regular followers.  Also, all of my tweets appear on the blog – so there’s no need to have a Twitter account if you want to see what I’m twittering on about.  On this year’s TGO Challenge, I’ll probably tweet more than I blog as it’s an easy way to post a photograph with a few short comments.

One thing I’m aware of, as a relatively new outdoors blogger, is that there are hundreds of fascinating blogs out there and there just aren’t enough hours in the day to read them all.  I love getting comments on my blog, so I feel a little guilty when I don’t get round to leaving comments for other bloggers.  I use Brief, in Firefox, to subscribe to around 50 outdoors blogs and I estimate my current backlog is about 200 unread posts.  I must make more effort.

If you’ve read this far – Thank You!  I find the “My Stats” page quite addictive, so I hope this post has been of some interest to the rest of you.

PS – Current pageviews is now 5,280!