Fascinating

See the blue circle in a box under the credits section of my sidebar? It's for Extreme Tracking, a free service that tells me how people find my blogs--what sites they link from, what searches they made, and so on. It also tells me about individual visitors to my blog. Interesting stuff.

Anyway, I noticed from my site counter stats that I've had increased traffic lately, so I thought I'd check it out. I've only been using the service for a month or so, but I tend to check out the tracking stats every two weeks or so.

Here are search engine queries that brought up my blog:

• Murder in the Hamptons (Yes, I reviewed it)


• Laurie Monroe scrapbooking (Well, there's Laurie Likes Books, Lucy Monroe, and scrapbooking--one link, one author, and one topic I regularly discuss)


• Writing about Cinderella story (Huh?)


• Sony DSCWS (A digital camera I considered until I bought my Fugifilm)


• Bubble gum ice cream Tampa (I think I've mentioned that bubble gum ice cream is a guilty pleasure, and I made a recent trip to Tampa)


• Leslie Kelly Make Me Over (I've blogged about Leslie Kelly, but not this particular book)


• Alyssa's sampler (Well, my name is Alyssa, but other than that . . .)


• Blog Swapping (Don't know why this should come up more than any other blog)


• A Cinderella Story the Book (Don't know)


• 2B (Isn't this a book? I haven't blogged about it)


• Scrapping book (I've mentioned both scrapping and books, as well as scrapbooks)


• Undead and Unappreciated Excerpt (I've mentioned this book a few times)


• Tim Bindner Child Murder (I reviewed a true-crime book about Tim Bindner, though his status as a murderer remains unproven)


• Book Scrapping (See "Scrapping book" above)


• Stefani Powers (Did I mention a miniseries of hers, Deception, that's one of my guilty pleasures? Otherwise, I have no idea)


• Where can I find Tina Donahue books? (Not here, though I might have written about a Brava anthology with her in it.)

It amazes me what people search for.

As for people following links from other blogs, Maili, Rosario, and Kristie are the top three referring sites. In the past week or so, I've gotten traffic from people visiting Keishon's site (thanks for linking to my response to your TBR challenge!), Charlaine Harris's message board (where I posted a link to the blog entry about the signing), and Romancing the Blog (since I posted a column there last week).

I don't know if any of this really means anything, but it's fascinating stuff.

Alyssa