Based on some of the feedback from yesterday’s blog about sprouts I decided to start a sprouting blog. It is up and running on WordPress.com Kitchen Counter Gardening.

In case you are wondering, “why put the blog on WordPress when you already have your other blogs on blogspot?” Several of my web design clients have been asking me for help with their WordPress sites. It is true that one can learn quite a bit about a CMS using a local server installation such as WAMP. I have a windows apache mysql php install on my desktop so that I can test Joomla, wordpress, and other CMS systems. All part of my php programming adventure.

However, to really stumble upon the little tricks and traps of a CMS (content management system) one really needs to use it in earnest. Nothing like really wanting to accomplish something to run you smack dab into pot holes and speed bumps. For example, every time I want to monkey with the settings for the front page it takes me forever to remember that the front page settings are under Appearance/Reading. When I find it, it makes sense. But when I am poking around in the menu system it just doesn’t jump out at me saying click here.

In any case, I needed a real-life project to get into the nuts and bolts of WordPress so that is why the Kitchen Counter Gardening blog is on wordpress.com

I’m not much of a sprouting expert. Can’t sprout a zillion different seeds and beans. Basically I sprout a few items that I have found over the years to be easy and reliable to work with — mung beans for example.

Even so, I am a total advocate of sprouting. I wish it could break away from the reputation of hippie new age kitchen practices and enter into the main stream. Mostly because I believe sprouting can easily improve the quality of life for many individuals living on a budget.

While it is true that I have had the good fortune to make a nice piece of change with programming, it is also true that I have spent a good part of my life living on the financial edge. When buying food on a budget, fresh vegetables are the first causalities.

This is unfortunate. Fresh living food is important to attitude and sense of well-being. Poverty is not the time to let your attitude go.

Faced with the prospect of not enough money for fresh vegetables, I would resort to rice and beans — good foods but lacking in the things that fresh living foods can provide.

Sprouting to the rescue. One day I discovered (actually re-discovered) that if I put those beans into a jar I could convert those dried high-starch nuggets into living vibrant fresh vegetables.

It takes some planning. It takes some discipline. It takes some grunt work. But with not too much extra effort one can get started on the path of kitchen counter gardening and really stretch your budget.

While working on an SEO posting for my other blog it became necessary to find a search expression that would return only a few results. I wanted to find a search phrase for which there would only be a few pages that matched.

Silly me, for some reason I figured “tattooing pigs” would yield few, if any, results. Did you know that tattooing pigs is a huge endeavor on this planet. Artists all over the world are using our swine buddies as canvases for their art. Go to google, type in “tattooing pigs” and press the search button. You will find somewhere in the neighborhood of 723,000 pages on the topic of tattooing pigs. That’s almost a million pages on the topic. I would have lost that bet. Tattooed Poultry is even worse — 3,730,000 results.

A “left-handed monkey wrench” has only 12,000 search results. Turns out that this is an unusually low number.

When I started this hunt for search terms with low results I had no idea how truly weird the situation had become. Alas, I need to find a nice corner and go catatonic for a while.

At least good ol’ “morphotony” still only had 64 results.

p.s. If you want to see the end of this hunt check out “Walk In Traffic” on my SEO blog

A Walk In is either a customer that happens to travel past your store and decide on the spur of the moment to drop in or they are a person whose original soul has departed his or her body and has been replaced with a new soul, either temporarily or permanently.

In this blog we are referring to customers. So please put your marketing thinking cap on.

Once upon a time, long long ago, in a land far far away a website would receive a far bit of walk in or drop by traffic. These are people that just happened to locate and visit your website through the vagaries of the internet.

Those days appear to be long gone. Unless you do something to deliberately promote traffic to your website it is most likely that you will receive zero traffic.

Let’s look at some numbers to see why this might be.

If you expect to get traffic from a walk in they will need to see your page in the search engine results page. To see your page in they search engine results page, they need to have done a search. So what is the average number of searches performed per day?

• Google    91 million per day
• Yahoo    60 million per day
• MSN    28 million per day
• AOL    16 million per day
• Ask    13 million per day
• Others    6 million per day
• Total    213 million per day

Thus your total potential exposure is 213 million per day. That is if all of the above searches are for your keyword combinations. How many searches are there for your keyword combination? Great question. So far I have found no answers. Google is extremely protective of actual numbers. They will give you graphs depicting trends and hot searches. But they do not give actual numbers on these charts.

For example, if you look up the search trend on “obama birthday” you will find a dramatic increase in August. But there are no numbers shown. Just the percentage increase.

This is an unfortunate gap in our ability to get a handle on what is happening. Deliberate I’m sure. But unfortunate.

So let’s just make up some numbers to illustrate the process. Let’s assume that out of the 213 million searches per day 1% are on your exact keyword combination. This is an absurdly high number. That would mean 2.13 million people a day could potentially see your page in the search engine results. But what page are you on? And how many pages into the results can you reasonably expect people to dig?

On rare occasions I will dig three pages into the search results. How many pages will you dig? Two? Three? Ten? If you are not on page 1, 2, or 3 you can pretty much drop any expectation of being found in the search results.

This is the situation for most people. Most folks do not show up in the top of the search results. This means that either they receive zero traffic or they promote.

But, wait a minute I thought the holy grail of SEO was going to get me on the front page of google search results. Check out a short discussion on my take concerning what SEO is.

Now that the internet is a vast wasteland filling with trillions of web pages the accidental visitorship of days gone by are long gone.

Today there is little or no accidental visitorship. Count on promotion. Don’t even dream you can bait a hook, drop it in the water and hope for a bite. It could happen, but it’s not very likely.