I don’t do much to optimize this site for search engines—or even do all the great stuff that companies and people much more focused on making income from their personal sites do to make their sites appealing to search engines. Pay for search terms, game my posts for keywords, and so on? Nah.

Also, I only resurrected this site from moth balls about six months ago. By search engine standards, this site doesn’t have a lot of chops.

So when my analytics show visitors arriving via search engines, I can’t help but wonder why. What do they seek that leads them to me?

As of this writing, three search categories find me on the web:

1. “Introverts appointment reviews.” Yep, these words exactly. In fact, this search term drives the most search-driven visitors to my site.

2. “Leslie Farnsworth.” Obvious, yes. Oddly, though, this blog doesn’t appear as the first result for my own name.

3. Next come all the search terms related to getting married in France, from the obvious examples (such as “getting married in France,” “small French wedding venues,” “civil marriage in France,” and various terms related to wedding venues in Normandy and the Loire Valley) to, strangely, terms such as “French baguette wedding planner” and “married to a French man.”

Perhaps I need to write a series of posts about marriage to French men? Clearly, that would drive traffic.

When I search my own name, my LinkedIn profile comes up first, which makes sense. Also, it shows people my latest Tweet string. Also, my Vimeo account appears. When I searched, this website showed up in position two in the search results. (On average, per Google, the site comes in at around search position 3.5.)

Of course, I should note (wearing my marketing hat), that what comes up for me won’t come up for someone else. All of us get different results from search engine queries based on our location when we search, our search history, and even our computer and technology use.

When I search for my top draw, “introverts appointments reviews,” I see my article reviewing books on introverts at the top of the results page. Surely someone who wants book reviews would search “introvert book reviews?”

The rest of the results for “introverts appointment reviews” don’t give me any intelligence on why someone would search for such a strange string of words. The predominance of the rest of the results focus on introverts in the workplace.

To me, this still doesn’t explain why people search the term. What do people searing for “introverts appointment reviews” mean by it? What could they possibly seek to find?

Whatever they seek, my site probably isn’t it.

Let’s reverse engineer this search-engine thing. Out of curiosity, what terms come to mind when you think of this site?