French Life-expat France

I just added this blog to a ‘blog statistic monitoring service’, so that I can see how visitors to the blog find us, and its been a fascinating experience. I’ve spent the last couple of hours engrossed as I can see ‘live and online’ what people have searched for in google etc to get to us. And the results aren’t quite as expected.

Now, my three hour sample includes 75 visitors (come on, where are the rest of you hiding) and I had the devious plan that I could use this information to choose a suitable advert to place at the top of the page. Pretty cunning, I think you’ll agree.

So if everyone is arriving at the blog because they are searching for, say, a holiday in France, I could have a big flashy ad for gites. You get the idea.

Now, it would be silly of me to tell you the exact phrases that I am found for, because some other unscrupulous expat blogger could pinch all my phrases and my visitors. But suffice to say, I am looking for an advert that includes reference to wild boars and birthday cakes, among a multitude of other things. If anything seems appropriate please drop me a line.

I’m pleased to confirm that visitors stumbling upon the main site search for more predictable things, to do with holidays, travel and so on.

Now, in my secret life as a webmaster, search engines get discussed a lot, including how relevant their results are - that is, do people using the search engines find what they are looking for. So I am going to let one ‘cat out of the bag’.

At this precise moment if you search in MSN.co.uk for ‘elections in France’ this very blog is at the number one place. Out of a total of 2.5 million results. Remember that yesterday was French election day, and about a month ago I wrote one blog entry on the subject.

Now I’m sure it was a fascinating entry that I wrote, but on the day that every news service in the world has the French elections as a lead story, I have to concede that showing my blog entry as first result is not the best idea. (By the time you verify this it might have changed, search engines being as they are, so I’ve included a screenprint above for posterity and evidence.)

Anyway I haven’t got time to sit here scribbling away, I’ve got more statistics to look at and adverts to track down. Much more fun than working in an office or mowing the grass, don’t you think?