About You
Our Web site is targeted at a specific audience, namely the older adult who is interested in learning more about natural health. Natural health is a Western form of alternative medicine. Natural health was born in American. These facts have a number of implications for our viewing audience.
Our topic should be of interest to English-speaking people living in both Europe and America who are interested in improving their health the natural way. Our obvious audience would, thus, be primarily composed of older adult Americans.
Content:
Introduction
The Natural Language of Our Topic
Just about the only way anyone would find this site is through English language searches made on an Internet search engine, like Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Bing or from links on other Web sites.
Wikipedia, a large multilingual Internet Encyclopedia had at one time an article on natural health that was not available in any foreign language. Nor, do the foreign editions of their article on alternative medicine indicate that the phrase natural health translates very well directly into other foreign languages. Wellness seems to have a better fit. And, their Italian edition article has a graphic that indicates using English terms, like wellness, is quite acceptable.
International visitors should read our complete Terms of Service Agreement for further information on International Use.
While millions of people search for information on movie stars, like Sandra Bullock, each month very few people are interested in the topic of natural health. Search engines are able to track the popularity of searches made by their users. So, the approximate popularity of different types of searches is known.
Thus, in order to be successful a niche Web site, like ours, has to be about more things than just Natural Health. We are, thus also, about Wellness, Holistic Medicine, and Healthy Living. Natural health is NOT a religion. It is just a slang phrase that denotes the topic of our Web site. Natural health is just one of many possible ways of referring to the wellness movement. Natural health is, also, very similar to many other health oriented marketing phrases that have been popular in the past, such as biologic living or natural therapeutics.
How Real People Search for Information
Real people when searching for information on the Internet prefer to use slang language over more precise technical terminology. Thus, when searching for dietary information the vast majority of the public will search for the food pyramid when the more technically correct terminology would be dietary guidelines or the more scientific dietary interventions. In the real world, absolutely no one is looking for articles on dietary interventions or even healthy lifestyles, but a bunch of people want information on healthy living. And, even more people are interested in health and fitness information. What is the difference between these searches? Not very much, other than a reflection of what real people are actually searching for. Since we want the public to actually read our articles, we want all our pages to be found by them. Thus, we write our articles using lots of slang and common terminology because it is key to having our articles found by the public.
This webpage documents the demographics of who is actually reading our articles. While far from perfect, we do have a lot of anonymous statistical information about our actual audience. The data behind these demographics came from visits made during calendar year 2009.
Where does all this visitor information come from?
Briefly, visitors connect to the Internet through an ISP. Each connection to the Internet is assigned an Internet Protocol or IP address. For dial-up modem users these IP addresses are usually dynamically assigned by the ISP where modem connections are assigned a different IP address on each call. Whereas visitors using a DSL or cable connection are generally assigned the same IP address on each connection. For whatever reason, your modem sends a lot of information about your computer during each connection, call, visit to a Web page, or search on a search engine. The most identifiable information about each call, visit, or search is at the level of the IP address. Your IP Address relates to your approximate geographic location. Many types of organizations track your calls, visits, and searches through what is known as web analytics. All this information is invisible to Web site operators, unless they happen to be using some type of service that provides this type of information to them. Or, know how to analyze their server log files for visitor information. Without this information, Web site operators would not know if anyone was actually visiting their site. And, this information can be used to measure just how successful or popular a particular Web site or webpage actually is.
Audience Demographics
Audience measured by Alexa
Alexa, the Web Information Company, has built an extremely large database of information about Web sites that includes statistics, related links. This information comes from an extremely small subset of Web Surfers who have installed the Alexa toolbar on their Web browsers.
Alexa says that visitors to our site consist mostly of older adults (35 to 44 years old), females without children at home, those who attended graduate school, and are viewing our site mostly from work rather than at home.
This view of our audience is what is to be expected. Women in general are more concerned about their health then men are. Our science-based approach to natural health caters mostly to a highly educated audience. The older you get the more concerned you become over your health. Plus, the busiest days for our site fall within the work week rather than on the weekend.
In addition, using our site requires a lot of reading, a feature that caters to the graduate school population. In the future, the information available on this site will be broken up into smaller segments.
Audience measured by Quantcast
Quantcast is another company claiming to provide accurate demographic information about Web sites. Their data is positively NOT coming from javascript installed on this Web site nor do they offer Web Surfers a toolbar. Thus, they must be analzing data that is being collected by some other organization and using statistics to compute their demgraphics.
Countries
We received visitors from 180 different countries last year. The top ten countries are shown below. International visitors should read our complete Terms of Service Agreement for further information on International Use.
- United States
- United Kingdom
- Canada
- Australia
- Philippines
- Netherlands
- India
- China
- Germany
- South Africa
States In America
Traffic from the United States is heavily skewed towards only a few states. A visit from some states is just as infrequent as a visit from many different so-called undeveloped foreign countries.
Top-Ten States
- California
- Virginia
- New York
- Georgia
- Texas
- New Jersey
- Illinois
- Colorado
- Pennsylvania
- Florida
Bottom-Ten States
- Idaho
- South Dakota
- Montana
- West Virginia
- Delaware
- North Dakota
- Wyoming
- New Hampshire
- Rhode Island
- Vermont </0L>
- Win XP
- Win Vista
- Mac OS X
- Win 2000
- Win NT
- Linux
- Win 2003
- Win 98
- Win ME
- Win Win32
- Microsoft Internet Explorer
- Firefox
- Safari
- Opera
- JAVA Based
- Netscape
- Gecko-based
- Mozilla Suite
- Konqueror
- Powermarks Bookmark Manager
- 40% of the Hits to our site are referrals from Search Engines.
The majority of our traffic comes from 20 different search engines. Google, and all the dozens of foreign editions of Google, are considered as a single search engine. Google is the most popular search engine for our site, with Yahoo being a strong second. After that, the actual number of referrals from the other Internet search engines drops off dramatically.
- Yahoo!
- MSN / Bing
- Ask Jeeves
- Up to 21% of the Hits to our site are direct hits made by real people.
These visits are from people requesting a specific URL in their web browsers. So, they either type the URL directly, or specify a specific bookmark / favorite. This figure, also, includes any blocked referrals, such as from the use of firewalls.
- Using absolutely secure Web browser settings, generally is more trouble than they are worth.
- Absolutely secure Web browser settings, generally prevents the user from doing anything or from using many different Web sites.
- Since this Web site has no evil intent, there is really no reason to ever block a referral to our site.
- 21% of the Hits to our site are direct hits made by Web crawlers, Spiders, and Bots sent by the Internet Search Engines.
- 16% of the Hits to our site come from within our own site
This means that once somebody finds our site, they actually bother to check out another Web page or two.
- The remaining 2% of hits to our site come from hyperlinks on other Web sites.
- /home/ - Wellness Program
- /food/ - Healthy Eating
- /tutorials/ - Natural Health Tutorials
- / - Home Page
- /exercise/ - Physical Exercise
- /resilience/ - Resilence
- /contact/ - Web site Administration
- /supplements/ - Nutritional Supplements
- /attitude/ - Attitude
- /gnu-dictionary/ - Dictionary of Alternative Medicine
- /antiaging/ - Anti-Aging
- /directory/ - Natural Health Web site Directory
- /reviews/ - A few links to articles on research
Computer Operating Systems
We got data on 24 different operating systems. A few people are still surfing the Web with Windows 3.01, believe it or not. So far, Windows 7 has not shown up in our data.
Web Browsers
Where Are Our Hits Coming from?
Which Sections of Our Site are More Popular?
Our site is divided up into sections called directories. Each directory covers a different sub-topic. They are listed in descending order of their popularity.
Please read our Medical Advice Disclaimer.
Please read Improving Web Site Accessibility, if you are having trouble viewing this Web page.
