A PhD in French Crepes

I love to see what keywords bring people to Yield to Pedestrian.  Unlike my other sites, which are so specific in topic and theme that the keywords are fairly predictable, Yield to Pedestrian ranks well for a crazy mix of keywords, reflecting the crazy mix of subjects about which I blog.

I can even quantify it for you.  Yield to Pedestrian has a long tail – a Web 2.0 term for the list of all keywords that bring people to your website – of more than 2100 terms.  Yes, 2100.

In contrast, my parenting and pregnancy information and organization site – which obviously has a much more specific field of interest – has a long tail of 1050 terms or so.  I started tracking the long tails of these sites at the same time, and have devoted equal amounts of attention to them. However, I get a lot more return visitors to the parenting site, and a lot more visitors via search to Yield to Pedestrian. Just goes to show you that that an eclectic blog can pull traffic, it just has to do so in a different way.

Two of the keywords I rank quite well for are “Henley Putnam University Reviews” and “French Crepe Stalls”. Indeed.

I am an instructor and PhD student at Henley Putnam University, and a huge fan of french crepes, and have blogged about both topics before. Which leads me to wonder, as I tend to do before morning coffee, could I rank at all for the term “PhD in French Crepes”? Is there even such a thing?  Probably not, since apparently no one has ever searched for this term nor does Google have any results for it.

But the point is that writing about what you like – be it food or philosophy – is worth doing in the blog world. Eclectic interests are rewarded by Google just as much as carefully sculpted niche markets. Blogging is about a willingness to write, and write each day or each week, more than anything else. Sometimes I think the whole “niche markets” point gets hit too hard. Niche is good, but having fun, like getting a PhD in french crepe making, is even better.