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 got through to the ATO today, regarding the letter I received about my ABN being cancelled. As I mentioned earlier, having an ABN (or any registered business entity) is required in order to purchase .com.au domain names.

Anyhow, the ATO girl (who sounded about 12 years old) simply ran me through a bunch of questions:

• What is your main business activity?
• Have you set up a trading name yet?
• Have you advertised you business?
• Have you purchased any business equipment / property?
• What else have you done to do with the business?
• When did you start trading?
• Is there other information you think is relevant?

After I answered all of the questions, she basically said I would receive a yay or nay letter within 28 days. I will follow up again when I get word.

I received a letter in the mail from the Australian Tax Office (ATO) recently. It looks like they are “cleaning up” the Australian Business Register (ABR). The letter says that because I haven’t reported any income against my ABN on my tax returns, I must not need it (my ABN, not income). Anyway, I originally applied for an ABN just so I could register .com.au domain names, as per Australian Domain Name Administration regulations.

This is the first financial year I could earn an income from my .au domains, and subsequently income on my ABN. Anyway, I have to call them and tell them why I need it. I will see if the “to register .au domains” is a good enough reason, and whether or not I can keep it on that merit only. Otherwise I’ll tell them that I am “just about to ramp it up”.

The other day I tried to call, I got put on hold but then something else came up so I had to hang up. I called back later and the message said something along the lines of “we are experiencing a high volume of calls and can not take your call right now”. I couldn’t even join the queue! I will let you know as soon as I can get through to them.