Do "pissing" and "sex" get you more hits?

Veteran bloggers must know this already. But, until the clever technocrats of the Times introduced me to “Google Analytics", I had no idea that you could find out what phrase the surfers had typed into Google to end up at your website.

Some of mine are boringly predictable. If you put “Mary Beard” into Google (not a Google mega-favourite, I have to say: precisely 211 punters in the last month), then -- sure enough -- you’ll end up with this blog. Same goes for “Mary Beard a dons life” (24 in the last four weeks), or “don’s life times” (35) – or, I should confess, “sw foska” (33). And I suppose that “Beckham’s new tattoo” had a captive audience (getting more than 120 searches in its various forms . . . “Beckham tattoo”, “David Beckham new tattoo”, “Beckham Latin tattoo” etc).

I’m also happy (and un-shocked) to hear it again for the “Times Literary Supplement” (26) and “Michael Bywater Cambridge 2007” (21).

But there are surprises in store. “Where is your spleen” – presumably typed into Google by those in search of some medical information – has just landed 23 hits onto my post about undergraduates not knowing their ancient geography. Some disappointed punters there, I imagine.

And until very recently my biggest Google hit was quite simply “pissing” (though it reached only 15 this month), which linked directly to my post about the smell of urine in the pyramids (“pissing on the pyramids”). From this I concluded that a large number of Google searchers were lads aged 10-13, who would have been mightily disappointed to have been taken to a site on Egyptian tourism.

It reminds me of the colossal number of hits that fellow blogger Stothard got with  his “Syphilis and Mrs Hardy” post (it wasn’t Mrs Hardy that got them clicking, I can assure you). All of  which caused considerable envy on my patch.

But there are some even funnier surprises.

I can see why you might type in “Sex on the beach drink” (4 in the last month) in search of the right quantities for the cocktail. And sure enough I did give the classic recipe in the relevant post. But the 6 who searched for just “sex on the beach” (6) or “drunken sex” (7), or “sex please” (4) would not, I imagine, have been expecting the cocktail blog!

And exactly how the solitary searcher for “liberty done nothing wrong nothing to worry about” (dubious thought though it is) came through to me, I honestly don’t know. Similarly the searcher after “it’s ok for men to cross their legs”.

Funniest of all though are the 4 lonely souls (or maybe the one lonely soul searching four times) who typed in “escort los angeles”. There’s no doubt, I’m afraid, that they were looking for something a bit more comforting than my dealings with a Rent-a-Wreck Ford Escort.

So we wait to see whether “sex” and “pissing” on this blog heading gets a bumper crop of hits. I’ll let you know.

Meanwhile, watch what you Google.