How many views does your average post get? WordPress has a strange way of measuring “views” and “likes” that I haven’t quite been able to figure out, but I consider a posting to be successful if it gets about 30 views. A really popular posting might get 50 views.
As I close out my retrospective look this week at my first two years of blogging, I thought I would share again the posting that, statistically speaking, is by far the most popular. Out of the 1200+ postings that I have done, only seven have over a hundred views and the second most viewed posting has 138 views. The posting below has had 371 views.
Don’t get me wrong—I like these photos of the fuzzy white caterpillar, but I certainly don’t consider them to be my best or my favorite images. How did I get so many views?
Not long ago, Leanne Cole, one of my favorite bloggers did a couple of postings on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that included a discussion of some techniques to make your photos and postings more visible when people do searches with Google and other search tools. I think I may have inadvertently used some of these approaches with the caterpillar posting, because the majority of the views seem to have come from people who found the images as the result of a search, and not from readers of my blog.
I don’t put a lot of faith in statistics and they don’t count for much in my personal estimation of the success of a posting. However, I am by nature a very curious person, so I can’t completely ignore them, even if they seem a little crazy.
Complete text of my 3 August 2013 “Fuzzy white caterpillar” posting:
It’s hard enough to identify moths and butterflies when they are fully grown—it seems almost impossible to do so when they are caterpillars, like this fuzzy white caterpillar that I encountered today at my local marshland park.
The caterpillar had so much long hair that it was hard to see the actual body, which might have been quite small for all I could tell. It was crawling around in the cattails on a day that featured intermittent rain. If you look closely at the first shot, you can see little water drops near what I think is the area of the head.
The second shot may look like it was done with flash, but the darker background was caused merely by changing the settings on my camera and deliberately overexposing the image.
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved
Mike Powell 
I can see myself searching for “fuzzy white caterpillar” if I saw one similar, so that is most likely why it gets so many views. I tag my posts with the common names of plants rather than the scientific names because that’s what about 98% of people would use when searching for them.
I did a post on a dangerous plant called giant hogweed once that got over 9000 views in one day, and I still don’t know what happened.
I can’t explain the giant hogweed views (9000 views is amazing), but I think you are right that people are more likely to do searches on simple, descriptive words than on scientific names. I usually try to include both.
It is a cool picture! I lived in Colombia over two years ago and tagged the term “Colombian men” in a few of my posts, and now, years later, “Colombian men” is the most popular search term that gets people to my blog…despite the fact that my blog was never really focused on Colombian men. It’s kind of frustrating because I rarely even write about Colombia any more, but I suppose I have to take my hits however I can get them!
My very fluffy, quickly written post “Colombian Men are the Best” has received 5,802 views while some posts I really put a lot of thought/time into have received 10 or 12 views :(. I know I should be grateful that people are visiting my blog and I am, but I wish my current interests were more interesting to people! Or maybe I just need to start writing about things that actually interest people?
I once wrote about trying to figure out the logic behind my stats on Flickr (if you care to read – http://nofacilities.com/2013/11/19/trying-to-make-sense-of-flickr/) I don’t think there is a logic to it. I’ll be one of your views every day, unless I miss the email. I know that I can count on something cool to look at and usually, I learn something.
How I agree with the other comments – I think that your macro work is great – you must have a lot of patience
I do not get that many hits because I don’t open facebook to general
public and neither do I use flikr but this way I have my favourite bloggers and always look at their work
What an interesting post! I follow my stats, though I don’t have the foggiest notion how wordpress gathers the data. Most often, I’m amazed at the data that shows where my readers are from – to think that folks from all over the world read my post just blows me away!!
Nice images, Mike! And interesting stats info. M
OMG, I am astounded at views being so few in photo blogs. I always thought them to be far ahead of the pack in views (but behind design blogs getting 30,000 views a day). I won’t even mention views I get on my popular blog which up until recently when I started this new nature blog, I split the content between them. So far the more popular blog remains so, and the new one is at least doing OK so far. I wish you had this post two weeks ago before I made the leap, it does not give me as much hope for getting my new blog off the ground and running.
Oh Mike, that second shot is just beautiful! Wonderful capture.
Searches originating outside of WordPress that get search terms documented are often a source of hilarity for me, and I suspect, based on the search terms, many users are terribly disappointed upon arriving at my blog (chuckle)
I too love to see the search terms that people used to get to my blog postings. One of my friends periodically does a posting with some of the more unusual ones she has seen for her blog.
Mike, this is an interesting post. I have often wondered about WordPress statistics. Based on the number of followers you have (close to 1000), I assumed you were routinely getting hundreds, if not thousands of hits per day. You get lots of comments and lots of “likes”, but why only 30-50 hits? Puzzling. Thanks for the web link on SEO. My daughter warned me about search terms and title banners when I started this blog three years ago, but frankly it didn’t seem to matter much until just recently, as in the last few months, and I am completely at a loss to explain why.
Thanks for your thoughtful comments. The question of why people choose to “follow” a blogger is a mystery to me. When I first started to blog, I went out looking for blogs to follow, but I have now reached a point near my manageable limit. Most of my comments come from faithful readers like you who I consider to be friends and who support and encourage me. Some people I know have thousands of Facebook “friends”–I like having a smaller circle, both on Facebook and my blog.
I forgot to mention that I learned from your friend’s blog that I had been mislabeling my photos by not using that alternate text box correctly. WordPress automatically fills the alternate box with whatever you put in the photo caption, which is usually way too much and unsearchable text. That was a lesson learned too late!
Don’t feel too bad–I rarely put captions on my photos! I’ll have to try to remember to do so.
I can’t answer why that specific post got the most hits, but I can tell the reason why I opened it (as opposed to only view in the Reader). When I first saw the picture I wondered what it was, I hadn’t seen anything like it before, so for me the answer is Curiosity. 🙂 Also, when I search for something I rarely know the exact name and/or the Latin name so in this case I would search for “white”, “fuzzy”, etc.
I have always found stats interesting on wordpress as things sometimes don’t quite match up, for example how can I have more likes than views. Surely if they like a post even from the reader then that should be counted as a view.
Lovely shots Mike, I rarely look at my stats and don’t have a clue how they work, when I do check them out they are never really great but they have gone up of late a little bit … nothing great but the idea of my blog was more of a front for my images as opposed to a web site, I don’t host any images on wordpress as they are linked to my smugmug site only because wordpress uses compression and smugmug does not 🙂 … But in general my stats are quite low.
Your stats might be low, but your images are consistently amazing. It’s a shame that more people don’t see them. Sometimes I look at other photographer’s images and I think that I could capture something similar. In your case, though, even with a 1DX and a 500mm lens, I know that at my current stage of development, I couldn’t get images like yours. Perhaps some day 🙂
Thanks Mike 🙂 … having a long lens that captures a lot of fine detail is half the battle, dont ever kid yourself you are a brilliant photographer and I admire your work alot 🙂