So, I ran a ‘contest’ of sorts to see if anyone could ‘guess’ what keyword or keyword phrase sent me the most traffic.

It’s really no contest.  Probably the top 8 keyword phrases or so are some combination or derivation of  ‘Coke bottle‘, ‘Coke Bottle Shape‘ or something like that.  Crazy, huh?

So, there were several ‘takeaways’ that I wanted to share with you all in regards to this observation:

All of this traffic is just from some random images I put into my “Sex Sells” post about Subliminal Advertising and some Ad-art work in South America that caught my eye and made me laugh.  It has very little to do with the subject or topic of this site

Yes, it’s true that this isn’t a ‘commercial’ site and hasn’t been optimized for SEO purposes, but c’mon.  None…NONE of the comments/guesses were even on the right track.  It just goes to show:

1.) Our eyeballs and intuition are no match for STATS to tell what Google, (et al) think our site is about

2.) Big, popular topics drive a LOT more traffic than relatively obscure things like ‘do follow’ links

3.) Our TOOLS for determining traffic and focus of sites SUCK — if you aren’t looking at the sites’ stats you can pretty much ignore all those ’spy’ tools for telling you what’s going on (in my opinion), and, the biggest lesson.

4.) do NOT overlook the importance of having relevant and interesting images related to your subject matter and the power of ‘Google Images’ alone to drive traffic to a site.

Obviously, merely blogging about this pushes the Coke image further down the page, so maybe that effects my results going forward, but I thought it was an important lesson/reminder in the power of imagery…I’ve NEVER put that much emphasis on images and image tags, but it maybe time to revisit those age old assumptions about their relative importance in on page optimization.

I’ll follow up on this post to talk about some of the better guesses people threw out there…and that will give me a chance to throw around some ‘link love’.

DoFollow and Prosper,

r8r