Traffic

One of the many things I obsess over is the number of people who visit my blog each day. Yesterday I had 156 hits, which is about one-and-a-half times as many hits as I usually get on Mondays through Thursdays and about twice as much as I usually get on Fridays. My hits over the last few weeks have been a bit higher than usual, actually. This is due, I think, to a number of factors, all of which have to do with FoxyJ. Last week, Foxy included a link to my blog on a comment she left on a post about homosexuality over at Feminist Mormon Housewives. The week before that, she wrote a guest post at Northern Lights, which brought to her blog not only NL's regular readers, but also readers of Times & Seasons and Exponent II, where her guest post and blog were noted by admirers, and many of these readers ended up hopping from her blog to mine. In general, though, I think a lot of the rise in hits has come from the vague and untraceable Big News effect that caused my hits to spike when we announced the separation in April, surpassing even last August's numbers, when the Fobcave was linked to from the Salt Lake Tribune. Our reconciliation has not caused so dramatic a rise in numbers, but there do appear to be curious people checking in. Which, I'll be honest, I'm happy to have people checking in for any reason. I'm vain like that.

The 156 hits yesterday has little to do with all of that, though. As it turns out, about half of those visitors came from a search engine query for simpsonizing. Right now I'm fourth on Google's results for that query, but yesterday I was third. Simpsonizing, as it turns out, is not a very commonly used word, and Google doesn't appear to stem the word to search for simpsonize, which yields 50 times as many results and actually gets you the site you're probably looking for. And the cool thing is that I don't even use the word Simpsonizing in the post that's showing up on the results page. But the thing is, that's not how search engines work. They don't care so much about the words you use as the words people linking to you use. And it so happens that FoxyJ wrote a post the other day in which she used the word Simpsonizing to link to my post about Simpsonizing.

So thank you, FoxyJ, not only for sending readers my way, but for helping them to find what they're really looking for--and ultimately, what we're all looking for--a way to make ourselves look like famous animated people.