Danbar Drilling are Geothermal Drilling Specialists based in Lancashire – they needed a theme built which emphasised their professionalism and high quality approach to their work.

Then I realised, there’s actually three hot topics.

But first, the original two.  This blog had been quietly pottering along and not really generating much interest until two features.

One was called “Selling Sex” and concerned a possible escort agency client.  The other was about the new iPhone update.  Thing is, although they generated spikes, the ongoing benefit in traffic has been significant.

I also added an RSS feed to the blog from our Interconnect IT site.

Then we published a WordPress User guide.

Traffic’s been much more significant since then.

But what are the three things that generate the most traffic?

1. Anything about the latest hot gadget.
2. Sex.  We’re really simple creatures. People are interested in sex.
3. Articles about how to draw more traffic to your blog.

Anything else will just plod along, picking up scraps from obscure Google searches – especially on a rather techie biased blog such as this one.

Anybody else care to comment with other surefire traffic winners?

It’s not true.

And not only that, if you look at the heaviest users of the web, it’s not kids in their late teens – it’s the elderly.  A fascinating report has been written, commissioned by JISC and the British Library which blows apart many myths about how different generations search for information using search engines.

Read their pdf – it’s terrific stuff…

Still – I had a play with Alexa and Google and the stats were interesting to see. WordPress.com has practically exploded. If Alexa’s 2% reach is correct then that makes WordPress.com and all its blogs into one of the most potent internet nodes.

Looking for traffic to WordPress.org and its rivals (I’ve put in Joomla, Plone and Drupal) is also illuminating. I recommend a good play around with the charts. Also look at different regions if you’re working with Google.

Google’s CMS traffic

Alexa’s CMS traffic

I find these stats sites great fun. You can also see the effects of certain events. For example, searches for the word Botfly shot up and into existance last year – and these correlated with spikes in traffic to my story of my own experience of the little blighters. The reason was a TV show.

You can also get a taste for the desires of certain countries… French Kissing, it seems, generates huge interest in Pakistan. They also like English Girls.

Why? Because for a year, the page came at the top of the second page of Google searches for the term ‘botfly’ and then suddenly it got promoted to second from bottom of the first page. Look at the difference in clicks for that search term from Google:

The difference is worth about a 30% increase in traffic, in this case.