Your chiropractic office, your fashion designer shoe boutique, your electronics website, your NFL football offshore gambling blog, your local community parks and recreation center, why do people come to you? Sometimes it seems so obvious doesn’t it? One goes to the chiropractor for an adjustment, the fashion shoe store for shoes, and so on. We know that that’s not always the case. Maybe someone’s coming to a chiropractic office for a radiographic study of their wrist or nutritional counseling, never planning to have their spine touched. It’s one thing to know what people are seeking when they walk into your bricks and mortar business, it’s another to discover what people seek when visiting your website.

Chances are you have a web site, but do you take the time to regularly check log files and statistics to see what kinds of terms are being searched that bring people to your website? For a site about chiropractic you may expect searches like back pain, headaches, scoliosis, and even spinal decompression to be popular. Over the years I found that’s not always the case, and sometimes the most popular searches are for terms that may appear to have nothing to do with your primary topic. If you’re not checking your log files, you may never know if that’s the case for your site or blog.

Keyword research appears so 20/20 in hindsight that it can leave any news webmaster wondering why they didn’t use particular terms and phrases when creating their content in the first place. Politically related search traffic will undoubtedly reach an all-time high during the next 96 hours, and aside from the obvious searches for Obama polls and McCain polls, the potential combination of key phrases leading up to Tuesday’s election, is simply mind boggling.

Everywhere I’ve looked on the Internet these past 48 hours I’ve seen searches related to Joe the Plumber. It’s reached the point that search engines are even suggesting related terms such as obama plumber and joe the plumber keating. What about all the “normal” plumber searches, like those seeking local plumbers, a plumber in Los Angeles, or a plumbing drain specialist in San Diego? I have to imagine the search traffic in the plumbing industry has significantly been affected these past few days, likely clogging some plumber web sites, with lots of new unexpected traffic.

Link exchange requests are a common e-mail received at the Planet Chiropractic office. I’m sure a large number of webmasters receive e-mails like these, and I suspect many of them are automated, and targeted at sites that appear on some list that has been thrown together at some point in time. In the past 10 years that I’ve been overseeing operations at planetchiropractic.com, I can’t think of more than three times that we’ve actually agree to some sort of link exchange. Not that it wasn’t a good idea at the time, it’s just not something we did. Today, it’s something we definitely don’t do, nor is it something I’d recommend as a practice for any website owner, except in some specific instances.