Now that this blog has been around for one year, having migrated over to the WordPress platform for a couple of months, I think it’s fitting that I do a quick retrospective to see how this blog has grown to what it is today.

I’m not sure if this is because of the departure from GoDaddy’s ugly QuickBlog software, because I’m getting better at optimizing my articles, or because of my participation and guest-blogging for John Chow dot Com, but there has certainly been a steady increase in traffic for about two months now.

I remember when my Technorati ranking was well north 100K. Today, it sits in the 25k range with 375 links from 153 blogs. Not spectacular, to be sure, but a vast improvement over where I used to be. Things are going well, but there’s always room for more improvement.

So, as per my daily routine, I logged into Google Analytics to see what’s up, but instead of just looking at the past week, I looked at the past month to see where the traffic has been coming from. The top five referral sources are:

Google (32%)
John Chow dot Com (11%)
Mobile Magazine (11%)
Direct (10%)
– My own freelance writing site (6%)
– Other (30%)

I’m glad to see that I’m getting traffic from the search engines, because it shows that the spiders are working and I’m ranking well in the SERPs (search engine results pages). Although I’m a freelance writer, I don’t write about the business all that much in this blog. I plan on changing that in the weeks and months to come, while still keeping the arts, entertainment, food, and video game content at the current level. Why? Well, check out what are the top search terms leading people to Beyond the Rhetoric:

Michael Kwan
300 this is sparta
mortal kombat armageddon characters
tmnt nintendo ds
must have ds games

Apparently Michael Kwan is a DS-sporting Spartan ninja turtle that participates in mortal combat kombat. And I thought he was a famous Hong Kong singer.

So, what brought you to Beyond the Rhetoric and why have you decided to stick around (if you’re among my growing group of RSS subscribers)? I’d love to know, so please chime in with a comment below.