January 16, 2008
Skeet porn
How did you find my blog? Most of my daily traffic comes from regular readers who carry my link on their blogrolls. Some of it come from their readers, who use those same blogrolls to find out who their favorite bloggers are linking to. New readers also find me through message boards where I post and through social networking sites where my readers have been kind enough to post my links. A percentage of my traffic also routinely comes from search engines. That’s the traffic I want to talk about today.
I check the stats for my blog at least once a day, sometimes more. Usually I’m most interested in seeing which posts are getting the most traffic and where that traffic comes from. I can use that information to produce more content that will please my readers. Lately I’ve been getting a lot of search engine traffic to my posts about hidden object games. I also get consistent hits for every post and photo I’ve ever published that is tagged “Hawaii.” I’ve posted a few recipes that appear to be pretty popular - my “grilled cheese and bacon” posts get traffic from search engines months after they were published. The searchers who find me using those terms get the results they’re looking for. So do the readers who land on a one-time reference to life insurance quotes or dog tags. There’s one other term that’s always brought me a lot of traffic, though most of it is unintentional. I blogged about the phenomenon over a year ago when, as a new blogger, I was just becoming aware of search engine traffic. That post remains popular and still brings me traffic on a regular basis. I’d like to think that’s because of my storytelling skill (it is a good story,) but that’s probably not the reason. Skeet most popularly refers to anything related to the sport of skeet shooting, but the hip-hop culture has revived an old meaning that is less well-known to anyone over the age of twenty or so. It is that meaning that brings me the most traffic for the word skeet. Unlike most of those searchers, though, I still contend that Skeet is not a dirty word.
According toThe Free Dictionary, skeet has a number of definitions that aren’t obnoxious.
The term skeet may refer to:
• A clay target.
• Skeet shooting or Clay pigeon shooting, a sport using such targets
• The Olympic Skeet event.
• Skeet surfing: A fictional sport featured in the 1984 movie Top Secret!, written and directed by the Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker.
• Possibly because of their physical resemblance to the clay target and that they fill the sky when deployed; the EFP warheads of the BLU-108 sub-munition, found in for example the CBU-97, are also called Skeets.
• Slang for coitus interruptus. The ejaculatory term for ‘pulling out’ the penis and ’shooting’ semen derives from the act of skeet shooting, pull and shoot.
• Term used in Newfoundland English to describe a low class, disruptive person.
• Term used in Manx English or Anglo Manx to describe news or gossip.
• Slang for cocaine, also may be known as skeeter.
• Skeet Ulrich, an American actor
• A sport involving inner tubes, rocks, beer and a stump; often played along the banks of The Yellow Breeches Creek in Pennsylvania.
• An awesome blogger
Okay, I made up that last one. 
Skeet will always, first and foremost, be a name to me, because that’s how I first knew it and because it’s become a part of my own identity. I’d like to think that people who find my blog “by mistake” through search engines find it because they’re into the sport of skeet shooting or because they’re fans of Skeet Ulrich or Skeeter Davis or any of the other popular holders of the various versions of the name. Alas, I know that it’s just not so. That knowledge was reaffirmed today when I followed a search link from my Statcounter to Windows Live Search and got a bit of a shock.
I’ll admit that it’s quite gratifying to find that my blog is number 5 in relevancy for “skeet.” But take a look at the classification that follows the heading for the entry. Pornography? My blog is designated as porn? Disturbing, to say the least. I decided to do a little research on the subject. I entered the term “skeet porn” into the same search engine:
Woot! Now I hold the number one and number two positions. The relevancey of this search actually makes sense. There have been times when I’ve used the word “porn” in a post, usually as a statement to readers concerning links I will kill if they show up in my comments. For the record, skeet’s stuff is not a porn site. I don’t publish porn or allow pornograpy sites to take advantage of free links via my do-follow comment policy. However, now that I know that my blog can be found by people searching for porn sites I thought maybe my research should be extended. Please note that this is not a scientific survey and that your results may vary. Your results probably will vary, because serach engines are lively animals and the results they produce are impacted by each bit of information published on the web and by each search conducted.
I used three search terms: skeet, skeet porn and skeet pornography
I entered each of those search terms into three different search engines.
The results of my experiment appear below. After each term you will see the page my link appears on and the postions of links to this blog within the first five pages of search. I did not scroll past page five on any of the search engines, so results with higher numbers don’t appear.
Windows Live Search:
skeet - page 1 postition 5
skeet porn - page 1 postions 1 and 2
skeet pornography - No results
Yahoo!
skeet - page 3 postion 25
skeet porn - page 3 postions 22 and 25
skeet pornography - No results
Google
skeet - page 1 position 9
skeet porn - page 5 position 50
skeet pornography - page 5 position 42
What does all of this mean. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps something quite relevant to any blogger wanting to increase their traffic by understanding where it comes from. If you are looking for any use of the word “porn” on my blog, the search engines will help you. If you are looking for actual porn you’re up the creek because you won’t find it here. By show of hands, how many of you have ever gone to a search engine for the specific purpose of finding actual porn or even the word porn on my blog? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Entering skeet coupled with either porn or pornography in a search engine and finding my blog is a fluke. People who use those word combinations are not looking for skeet’s stuff. They are searching for … well, porn that features skeet, and we’re not talking about the beloved author of this blog.
How is that relevant to you as a blogger? It’s a bit of information that you can use to increase your search traffic. Everyone gets hits from searchers who were looking for something quite different from what they found. It’s the fluke factor. Search engines aren’t mind readers. They can only return results based on the data entered, not on the intent of the person doing the search. Take a look at your own stats for search engine traffic. What terms routinely send you traffic but have no real relevance to your content? How can you use that information to draw more traffic? Do you even want to attract that traffic? If we’re speaking only in terms of traffic it doesn’t really matter to me how people found me. What matters is that they did. So, yes - it matters to me that people find my blog when they are searching for porn. What I want more than casual, one-time visitors, though, is for people to come to my blog, find what they’re looking for, stay a while and come back again regularly. I’m pretty sure none of the porn creeps are doing that. The hidden object game searchers do. Quite a few of them have become my regular readers. So have some people looking for stories and photos about day-to-day life in Hawaii and even a few who first found me because they wanted to know how to make the perfect grilled cheese and bacon sandwich. Those are the readers I want. Those are the readers who find relevance in what I post. They are all part of a group that I need to optimize my keywords for. I’ll admit that numbers are not as important to me as some people think they should be, but that I’m not above using the fluke factor to increase them. This post will undoubtedly jiggle the fluke factor and result in an increase of readers who find me while searching for skeet porn. The better search engine optimization tactic, though, is to produce quality content on topics that appeal to the readers I already have so that I can increase my readership organically with more readers just like them. By using relevant keywords in relelvant content I can optimize opportunities for new readers to find me through legitimate searches. That’s much more satisfying than a bucketload of 1-second visitors who don’t want what I have to offer.
[tags]porn, pornography, SEO, search engine optimization, search engine traffic, skeet[/tags]
