1000 visits, finally
I've been watching the number in my Google Analytics account for the past few weeks as it climbed slowly up through the 900s to top (at last) 1000 visits.
In the web world a thousand visits a month isn't anything to brag about. A thousand visits a week is decent, a thousand a day, pretty good. So I'm not breaking out the champagne just yet. But it's taken me a while to get this far, so I'm going to enjoy it.
I'm less happy with other numbers shown in the chart. If you compare the numbers from eleven months ago (at right), you can see that while the number of visitors has tripled, other numbers have gone down. People are visiting fewer pages, spending less time on the site, and leaving immediately more frequently (Bounce Rate).
Why? I think it's the pictures. Looking at the numbers for how people find my site, nearly half (46%) come via a Google image search. They're looking for a picture of something and they find it on my site.
This happens because I'm pretty diligent about writing what's called "alt text" for each image on the site. These descriptive words, helpful if an image doesn't load or if the visitor is using a screen reader, also identify the images for the search engine. Since search engine "robots" don't see and understand images—yet—they find them via their descriptive alt text, along with things like nearby text and labels that people give them via the Google Image Labeler.
So, hundreds of people each month find an image on my site. After seeing it they click away. I'd like to have more visits from people who are interested in design, education, art and/or life in Cleveland rather than some random picture. I could use a few links from other sites, but I haven't had much luck getting links from Cleveland-oriented websites. Or design-oriented sites. Or education-oriented sites. So if you'd like to link to TheViewFrom32, I'd sure appreciate it. Tell your friends.
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