Living the Fictional Dream

The search terms that result in hits on this blog are interesting — at least to me.

For example, I wrote one post this year comparing my new favorite vampire paramour, Sookie Stackhouse, to former powerhouse Anita Blake, and, I swear, that post has garnered more search hits than any other. When I go through the list, 44 of the 108 tearch terms used in the past month were related to Sookie, Anita, or both.

My posts mentioning the Twilight series and the TV show Castle garnered quite a few search terms of their own, though not as many as Anita and Sookie did. Strangely enough, many searches people ran trying to find out the names of the writers in the poker game in the first episode of Castle hit my blog quite a few times. I guess I am a writer (and my blog is a writing blog) and I wrote an entry about Castle, so it makes sense.

The lesson I’ve learned from the above is that if you want search engines to direct people to your blog, blog about big names in pop culture. Of course, the caveat is that most of the people who visited my blog due to one of these searches spent little to no time on the site. For the one or two who spent a few minutes, most of the others spent 00:00:00.

My post on vampires versus werewolves came up with several search topics that were actually on the same topic (search terms like “what’s the rivalry between vampires and werewolves”).

My recent post about wacky eye colors in L.J. Smith’s novels made my blog hit on a search for “characters with unique eyes” — so, I guess, that one person’s crazy eyes is another person’s unique.

The biggest laugh I got reading the search results was the search term “clavicle sexy.” The blog hit on that one because of the post I wrote a while back about the latest novel in the Luxe series and how the auther way overused the term clavicle when describing her characters.

And then there is the strangeness of searches like “erin selkie” and “erin’s story blog.” Of course it makes perfect sense that those searches would turn up hits for this blog. The oddness comes from the fact that of those two searches, one recorded zero time spent on the site and the other recorded only 3 seconds spent. Is there another Erin out there who has a story blog and/or who has written about selkies? If so, I would like to meet this doppleganger.

The person who searched for “erin ‘the wall’ hypersonic tales” only spent 14 seconds on the site, and I know good and well that person was searching for me. But maybe they didn’t want the blog, but wanted to look at the actual story on hypersonic tales?

Last, but not least, someone came to my blog as a result of the search “summerlyn’s dream.” I really wonder what they meant by that. I assume they were not referring to my baby girl. It’s amazing how many Summerlyn’s I’ve heard about since we chose that name for our daughter. We thought it was so unique — the person we heard about it from spelled it Summerlan, and we used a different spelling. But, since July, I’ve had at least two other people tell me they know someone named Summerlyn (one a little girl born two weeks after ours). I would be interested to know what Summerlyn this searcher was looking for when they wound up on this blog.

Well, there’s not really a conclusion to this rambling post. I’m about out of blogging time for today, so I’d better end this. Maybe some day I will think of a way to use these search results to the benefit of my blog, but, with the exception of blogging about big pop culture items, I can’t see how at the moment (and I don’t want to blog about pop culture as an angle… I only want to do it if I’m moved to).

I guess the biggest moral of the search results story is that, 9 times out of 10 (or even more often than that), they don’t really matter. The searchers don’t spend any time here anyway, because, no matter how relevant the term, it wasn’t what they actually wanted to read about anyway.

Happy searching and blogging everyone!