Playing with SiteMeter

Last year I put SiteMeter on both of my blogs. The free version tells me where people come from and, more importantly, what their search terms are. What this means is that I can figure out how people are getting to my site--and it's mostly by Google. Many people are looking for specific information--how to negotiate cash for keys or what their rights are to their security deposits. Some people want to know what a Notice of Default is, or they heard about the new federal legislation on foreclosure evictions and want to know how it works. And at least once a week I get a search something like "lease option foreclosure deposit," which unfortunately informs me that some sleazeball made some extra money on his soon-to-be-foreclosed house by enticing a tenant to sign a lease option on a property that was about to be foreclosed. (Because lease options often involve large deposits, the soon-to-be-foreclosed owner can get $5-20,000 from the unsuspecting tenant.) I also apparently had a landlord, as the search was "i'm in foreclosure and my tenants have stopped paying on their lease option." Uh, what should the landlord expect?

Sometimes people want to come back to my site and, not realizing that "tenants foreclosure California" reports me first on the Google search, remember odd things and search for things like "tenants foreclosure Sacramento cats" because they remembered that I live in Sacramento and have two cats. I wonder if J will be upset when he discovers that no one has searched for "tenants foreclosure Sacramento husband."

One thing I discovered is that if people search for "renters foreclosure California," I don't turn up for dozens of pages. While I don't like the term "renter" and don't use it most of the time (believing that I am a renter when I rent cars or power tools, but I am a tenant in housing, with all the political and legal disabilities that attach to that status), I do want people to be able to find me without having to search through pages and pages of Google entries. So I have to figure out how to get "renter" in a sufficiently prominent position that it will enable that search.