I want to do a few posts about the importance of analysing your server logs / website statistics, but in the mean time let me tell you a bit about the referrer data I’ve been seeing lately.

Firstly, how cool (or scary) is it to see people searching for your name? Granted that I am certainly not the only Paul Cherry in Australia, but I’ve seen several searches for “paul cherry” coming in on my logs. Am I the Paul Cherry that user was looking for?

Last night I posted some ads for staff we need at Boomerang, and “Paul Cherry, Business Development Manager, Boomerang.com.au” is on the bottom of the advertisements on Seek. Since then I have seen a few visitors coming in from Google who have searched for “paul cherry boomerang”. Those ones are definitely looking for me, but why? Maybe they just want to know if I’m a cool guy to work with? Of course I am! Just ask all the people that have worked for me that haven’t been fired. Or maybe they were looking for my direct email address to get a leg up? If that’s what you’ve visited for, here’s a hot tip: the Seek email comes directly to me anyway.

Here’s some more data I’ve been seeing:

A few hits here and there for how to cook steak and herbs to use with roast lamb, the traffic came in from terms including:

• cooking roast eye fillet steak
• roast lamb with bitter herbs
• how to cook eye fillet steak
• cooking roast lamb
• how to cook steak
• roast lamb herbs
• roast lamb

My post about ABN cancellation has attracted a few other affected Aussie’s who are searching for more information:

• abn cancellation
• cancellation of abn
• abn cancellation letter

And with my history of building high quality poker tables and providing my poker table plans on the internet, I am now seeing some traffic for:

• how to build a poker table
• cherry table plans
• making a poker table
• how to make a poker table

Of course, this is just the referrer data, there is so much more to learn from this than just what traffic you got. You can use this data to optimise for the traffic you want to get! Stay tuned for future search engine optimisation posts and I’ll teach you how analysing the web statistics you’ve got will help you get the statistics you want.
At the moment I am using a free web statistics tracker available from http://www.statcounter.com. It’s worth noting that the StatCounter website has a prestigious PR10! Clearly from all of the backlinks from people using the system and posts like this saying how good they are!

Update: I just checked the statcounter website, they’ve lost their PR10! OMG! It’s now only a PR9, buy hopefully getting another inbound link from the all-powerful Paul Cherry Blog (currently PR0) will push them back up!

I registered my domain name, paulcherry.com.au on Saturday 15th December. On Wednesday night (19th) I checked Google.com.au for the term “paul cherry”. There it was, my new website ranked number one on Google Australia, for both “The Web” and the “Pages from Australia” result sets.

I know this will fluctuate and go up and down with time. However I will tell you how I “got to number one” in such a short time. This list is in no order of importance, it’s just what I have done so far to get to this point.

1. It’s a weak topic, or “niche”. How many people do you know that are optimising for the term “paul cherry”? If I bought “hotels.com.au” and tried to do the same thing in 5 days, I doubt I would have the same luck.
2. Dedicated IP address. This domain is hosted (in the USA mind you) on a dedicated IP address. This means it shares the IP with no other websites.
3. Outbound links. I am unashamedly linking out directly (not via affiliate links) to other websites. I am not hoarding PageRank or inbound links. I am sharing the love of the internet and linking out to other good websites.
4. Inbound links. I have acquired a few good inbound links from my friends who have other blogs in good standing, some with decent PageRank.
5. Content is king. I started posting ASAP and am going to try to post some decent content every day.

The future. I am going to try and target another keyword and see if I can get ranked for that. So it will be twist on rule #1 above, however #2 will obviously stay the same. #3 I will continue to do, not just to sites about my new target keyword, but also any other decent site I refer to. #4 is key, I need to get some more inbound links with my next target keyword, and #5 is also a given. I need to post and create content around my new target key phrase.