That’s not half bad, really.

The AdWords tool assigns me these keywords: bald eagle (22), bird feeders (20), bird feeder (12), bird watching (11), bald eagles (6), bird house (6), bird (40), eagle (11), birds (31), eagles (5), birding (10), blog (7), Miscellaneous keywords (19). Not bad.

You can see from your list how much more specific people need to be to find your site – i.e., “bird” may be a common keyword, but I bet if you type it into Google, you won’t find your site until page 4,752, meaning that no one will ever find your blog with just that word.

You can pretty much assume that 80% of these searches are coming from Google since that’s their approximate search marketshare. The rest come from the rest, with Yahoo in the far 2nd position.

Btw – you can glean some valuable info from these lists, especially, if you can collate them over time (weekly, monthly, etc.). For example, you might see a frequent query that you can leverage to drive people to your site. I.e., if “hercules beetle” shows up consistently, you might think about writing a post on them to satisfy those searchers and thus push you higher up the “authority” ranks (while maybe attracting more readers too). Or, you might see phrases that make sense to use in your posts, or even add to older posts that are non-transitory articles (relevant and valuable long after they’re posted). And, as mentioned, you can see how general/specific the queries are that send people to your site. The more and more general they get the better, because it means that your blog is moving up the “authority” ranks in Google. Looking at your list, it appears you’re becoming a bit of an authority on “milk snakes,” which is probably why the extremely general keyword “snake” is driving traffic your way. Well done!

I don’t know about Blogger, but WordPress has a feature on the stats page of the dashboard that gives you a list of search terms that people came to your blog by. I assume these are Google traffic, though it doesn’t actually indicate where the search was being done. I always have very long lists for each day’s search traffic. I’m afraid my posts probably only satisfy half the searchers (for instance, I only ever mentioned the Hercules beetle in passing, but get a lot of traffic from it). Today’s so far (and it’s only 1pm) looks like this:

eastern milksnake
north american mammal carries young one
loud insects in georgia
eastern milk snake
50 legged bug
do female bumblebees have stingers
urushiol
laminate floor going grey
snake
dark brown caterpillar smooth toronto
hercules beetle
site:flickr.com horse woman
yellow bellied blackbirds ohio
temperate forest
large water beetles of north america
milk snake
blue jay bird
effect of yesterday’s eclipse on nature
moth traps
make a moth light trap
wild basil shrub
wild giant stump mushroom
whitespotted sawyer boring
snake images
salamander for water
three-pronged leaves with red stems & st
types of moths
colourful moths uk
scarabé hercule
pelidnota punctata
brown spider
bluet damselfly
another name for aquatic
do copivaleria grotei moths bite?
weevils in bird seed
what does a snapping turtle egg look like
blood sucker bug
red stuff coming from puffball fungus
wildlife and their habitat
frogs in stokes county
wrigglers feeding mosquito
stuffed bird
milk snakes
carpenter bee nest
earwigs in ontario
stick insect metamorphosis
red snakes
blue jay wing
snakes of ontario
high up in a tree

For example, I’m sure the synonym generators are what came up with “venus flytrap” from “pitcher plant” on Seabrooke’s site.

Long story short, it’s not giving you the search phrases that people are using to find your site, rather, it’s generating some keywords that MIGHT drive people to your site.

For example, taking Seabrooke’s blog again, I would bet that mixed search phrases like “kingston birds” and “ontario cicadas” are the more likely type of keyword combos that people are using to find her site.

I wonder – does Google have a tool to show you the actual search phrases that led to a clickthrough to your site? That would be very interesting.

venus flytrap (6), fly trap (5), pitcher plant (5), plant (21), plants (14), Miscellaneous keywords (19)

Clearly it’s picked up on my pitcher plant post (the most recent post). Although I never once spoke of venus flytraps.

Checking the linked pages box, I get a few extra terms:

venus flytrap (6), fly trap (5), pitcher plant (5), plant (28), bird (20), birds (17), plants (15), mushrooms (5), Miscellaneous keywords (41)

It’s still very heavily biased by my front page, though. It’s definitely rather eye-opening.

I couldn’t get that program to spit out any information on my blog.
I figured I’m too stupid and gave up again