Ben Best's Blog

Typically the last week of December and the first week of January represent deep dips for the number of sessions visiting my website -- comparable to the lows of the summers. After peaking at around 13,000 PageViews per week in January, PageViews
for my www.benbest.com/history/xmas.html page dropped in the first week of January to 1,768. Even without the otherwise slowness of this period that would represent a significant drop. Of course most schools are not in session during the last week of December and the first week of January in Christian-associated countries. Nonetheless, the "bottom line" figure for the first week of January was 24,169 sessions. That compares very favorably with the peaks of last Spring, which were around 27,000. Typically the weekly number of sessions climbs from the first week of January to a week sometime between late March and early May. So my prediction is that mid-Spring highs in 2006 will approach 50,000 per week.

I have done some more careful analysis of the meaning of session time. I have come to the conclusion that of the 24,169 sessions in the first week of January, approximately 20,000 of those sessions were for less than 10 seconds. About 500 would be for 3−10 minutes, another 500 would be for 10−30 minutes and about 150 would be for more than 30 minutes. Speaking personally, I would rather print a page than look at it on-line for more than 30 minutes. So I would guess that number of people actually looking at my website pages long enough to get meaningful information is in the area of 2,000 to 5,000 per week.

In the past I have paid much attention to the search terms leading to my website (because at least 75% of the PageViews come from search engines), but I am finding this matter less interesting now than previously. I used to be impressed that the search phase "neuron physiology" would return one of my web pages as the top site on all of the search engines. But the fact that I only get 5 PageViews per week for that search phrase indicates that it is not invoked very often. The search terms "neurotransmitters", "ischemia" and "vitrification" return 200, 48 and 13 PageViews per week (respectively) and I am on the first page of searches on those terms with Google, Yahoo and MSN search engines (but not top). I used to be top on all of the search engines for "vitrification", but now have been displaced by Wikipedia -- a bitter irony insofar as I wrote much of the text for the Wikipedia vitrification page.

# posted by Ben Best @ 9:57 PM