About You

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 or from links on other web sites.

Wikipedia, a large multilingual Internet Encyclopedia has an article on natural health that is not available in any foreign language. Nor, do the foreign editions of their alternative medicine article 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.

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 website, 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 website. 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 article 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 one week in September 2006. Demographics measuring the results of our latest search engine optimization efforts will be collected during the entire month of March 2007.

Where does all this visitor information come from?

Briefly, dial-up modem users connect to the Internet through an ISP. Each connection to the Internet is assigned an Internet Protocol or IP address. These modem IP addresses are usually dynamically assigned by your ISP where modem connections are assigned a different IP address on each call. For whatever reason, your modem sends a lot of information about your computer during each 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 website or webpage actually is.

Audience Demographics

Countries

We receive visitors from over 70 different countries each week (or about 120 countries every 30 days). The top ten countries are listed followed by average daily hits.

1. United States 368
2. Netherlands 58
3. United Kingdom 28
4. Canada 26
5. Australia 23
6. India 17
7. China 16
8. Italy 14
9. France 9
10. Philippines 8

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. The top ten states are listed followed by average daily hits.

1. California 78
2. Virginia 32
3. Georgia 29
4. Washington 27
5. New York 17
6. Florida 17
7. North Carolina 16
8. Colorado 12
9. New Jersey 12
10. Arizona 12

    States With the Fewest Visits

• Arkansas
• Wyoming
• Vermont
• Nebraska
• Delaware
• Montana
• Nevada
• North Dakota
• West Virginia
• Idaho

Computer Operating Systems

1. Win XP - 77%
2. Win 2000 - 9%
3. Win 98 - 5%
4. Mac OS X - 3%
5. Win 95 - 3%
6. Win Me - 1%
7. Linux - 1%
8. Other - 1%

Web Browsers

1. Microsoft Internet Explorer 57%
2. JAVA Based 19%
3. Bots, Spiders 15%
4. Firefox 6%
5. Safari 1%
6. Mozilla Suite 1%
7. Netscape .5%
8. Konqueror .5%

Where Are Our Hits Coming from?

1. 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.

   1. Google
   2. Yahoo!
   3. MSN
   4. AltaVista
2. 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.
3. 21% of the Hits to our site are direct hits made by Web crawlers, Spiders, and Bots sent by the Internet Search Engines.
4. 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.

5. The remaining 2% of hits to our site come from hyperlinks on other websites.

Which Sections of Our Site are More Popular?

Our site is divided up into sections called web site directories. Each section is coded by use of a different graphics background. Each directory covers a different sub-topic. They are listed in descending order of their popularity.

1. /food/ - Healthy Eating
2. /home/ - Wellness Program
3. /tutorials/ - Natural Health Tutorials
4. /exercise/ - Physical Exercise
5. /contact/ - Website Administration
6. / - Home Page
7. /gnu-dictionary/ - Dictionary of Alternative Medicine
8. /resilience/ - Resilence
9. /supplements/ - Nutritional Supplements
10. /attitude/ - Attitude
11. /blog/ - Natural Health Blog

    Directories NOT currently available from most web pages

• /directory/ - Our New Natural Health Directory
• /antiaging/ - Our New Anti-Aging Directory