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!

Welcome to PaulCherry.com.au, I am Paul Cherry. I started working in the online industry in early 2000 for a company then known as Toast.com. I responded to a advertisement in the local paper for a position as a “Search Engine Updater”. When I started, I actually joined a small group of developers who became the foundation of a brilliant SEO team.

The direction of that business evolved and it soon became known as DarkBlueSea (ASX: DBS). Within DBS I served many roles. I became manager of the SEO/traffic team and worked on various products including the beginning of DarkBlue.com (an affiliate network) and Fabulous.com (a domain name registrar and parking solution). There are close to 1 million names in total parked with Fabulous.com, half of which are owned by DBS. That’s right, DarkBlueSea has one of the largest domain name portfolios in the World, with over 550,000 registered to the company itself.

I left DarkBlueSea in 2005 to pursue another interest of mine, poker. I began working on Poker.com as a webmaster/SEO, where my only job was to keep the site at number 1 for the term “poker”. After several years, as internet businesses do, the direction changed. Poker.com became more than just an affiliate portal, we had a shot at building and running our own poker software client.

At Poker.com I helped design the software, became tournament director and then managed the affiliate team. We had a considerably small team (for a poker room) and I performed many tasks from software concepts through to marketing campaigns. I traveled to several industry events representing the poker room and even to the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas with some of our best players.

October 2006, all hell broke loose with the online gaming industry as the US House of Representatives passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act by slipping it in to the SAFE Port Act. The World’s biggest poker room, PartyPoker.com, lost 60% of its share value overnight.

The Poker.com software became CarbonPoker.com and continues to accept US players, while other poker rooms closed their doors to the USA. The owners of the company who I like, got out, and I soon followed. Poker.com became a poker information portal once again. CarbonPoker.com (and the software management company) has created a new poker network called Merge Gaming.

Early 2007, I began working for Boomerang.com.au (Australia) Pty Ltd. Boomerang is an Australian owned and operated web publishing company based in Brisbane. I am currently employed as the Business Development Manager and am involved in domain management, affiliate advertising and the company’s web development programs.

I am starting this blog quite late in my “online career” however I believe it to be a necessary platform for my future endeavours and also my current rants about the industries I am involved in.

Over the coming weeks, and in to the future, I will write my thoughts about (mostly Australian) affiliate programs, domaining, SEO/SEM and anything else in between. Welcome to PaulCherry.com.au.