I thought some of you might be interested in seeing the traffic for my Exotic Rainforest site in 2009. Since the site went on-line on December 5, 2005 I've had a total of 1,131,203 hits but 480,606 of those came in 2009. Since 95% or more of my pages are aroid related that tells me lots of people around the world are interested in aroids! It also tells me we need to do a lot more work on forming International Aroid Society chapters in Europe and Asia since there is a high interest in that part of the world. The map shows the visitors to the site in approximately the last six hours (10:00AM Central time) and yesterday was a very slow day! I just wanted you all to know how much I appreciate all the information you provide as well as your help! I have at least 50 aroid species I want to add to the site this year so maybe we'll see even more hits which will lead to at least a few more IAS members! For those of you reading this that have not considered joining the IAS please consider doing so today! I've met more great friends as a result of the International Aroid Society than at any other time in my nearly 64 years of life! www.Aroid.org If you will be anywhere near the St. Louis, MO area the weekend of April 24, 2010 please join us at the Missouri Botanical Garden for the MidAmerica IAS chapter meeting! You don't have to be a member of the IAS to attend but you'll see lots of great aroids! If you are interested in forming an IAS chapter any where in the world please let us know! The International Aroid Society Board of Governors will provide as much assistance as possible! Be sure and join us on FACEBOOK as well! http://www.facebook.com/pages/South-Miami-FL/International-Aroid-Society/291094100787 Thanks for your friendships and all the input!
Returning visitors averages between 8 and 10%. You can see the numbers just beneath the chart. As for robot view I have no way of knowing since the stats are gathered by a company called StatCounter. Since the site is not-for-profit my main interest is in learning what people what to know. I am able to see all the search terms people type into any search engine but have no way of knowing who the individual may be. I track the search terms as well as what page on the site they are directed to in order to try to provide a better resource. In many cases the pages on www.ExoticRainforest.com come up in the top 5 positions on all the major search engines but I'm always looking for ways to improve the information.
wow! what an amazing site with a wealth of information! i hope i can visit the exotic rainforest one day.
Actually, Steve, some search engines provide for that sort of query. I'm likely to use more structure, but I could type "What big leaf plant has potato-like root" into the old Ask Jeeves or the newer Ask.com and actually get some reasonable results for my unreasonable request. What I do if I'm very uncertain of where to look is type something into Ask.com as in "How disconnect power source" or perhaps "Eat aroid tuber" or "Make apron how". Any clunky query can work, but of course it helps to be more structured and preferably boolean. I used to use Copernic, a web crawler or meta search that used all the common search engines. It was interesting to see how some searches were better with different phrasing. If I asked a question, Ask Jeeves was almost always best. So I'd get a ton of results for "IRS online forms" but "Where IRS online forms" would be best answered by Ask or Ask Jeeves.
First, please know the Exotic Rainforest is open for you to visit any time! All we ask is an advance notice you'd like to come. We have visitors almost every week of the year but a few do just knock on the door when we're barely up and still in pajamas! It has happened more times than we can count! Some questions typed into a search engine are understandable but others would be difficult for a computer to decipher! This one popped up just today, "Names of all house plants that grows fast in temperatures of 70 and why don't plants grow good under green light?" I do have a page for the last part of the question but nothing specific for the first portion! I decided not to edit the sentence!
Those long sentences work sort of because of keywords. If people use very pertinant keywords it usually works to some degree then you can jump from there. I work in a very structured enviroment in the library world but I have been using certain note fields to enter terms that are not available in the structured terms so that a user may get a hit. Eg generic terms for music styles.Many have sub genre. Plants are another area that would probably work. Also adding suitable tags to the entries on UBC messages also are a useful tool to aid searches. Liz
