Like a lot of programmers I wrote CoverHunt.com in my spare time on a rainy night. I’m one of those people who like to have an immaculate music collection - with every song having the right titles for the song, artist, and album, as well as the right album covers since they are pretty useful and make it more fun to browse through.
After trying to organise all of my music in iTunes and having to go through the same tedious process over and over again to get the cover artwork I decided to make a simple little app that could do most of the work for me. CoverHunt gives you a list of results of free album cover artwork for your search, with the full sized image ready to just drag and drop straight into iTunes to add to your songs.
I created the site in August and had forgotten about it until I had to find a cover today for Pete Murray’s Feeler. While I was there I had a look at the statistics for the site and I was a little shocked - there were 6267 searches last month, with 678 visitors loading an average of 10 searches per visit.
It is quite cool to think that I haven’t really publicised the site at all but there are people there searching for all sorts of music - from Placebo and John Denver to Charlotte Church and Gwen Stefani.
You know where to go now if you need Free Album Cover Artwork. If you have got ideas for updates to the site go over to the FBT forum and leave your comments.
But how does this relate to increasing your traffic by reading your statistics?
Well, by looking at the referrers and what most of the users are searching for I can make life easier for them, and optimise the links that are being used to get there.
- 27% of them use Firefox to view the site, 64% Internet Explorer and 9% Safari - since these are all at least 10% we should have a look to make sure that there aren’t any bugs in any of the browsers.
- 62% of people go directly to the address www.coverhunt.com, so we might make it easy for them to add the site as a bookmark so that they can come back easily.
- 36% come from links on other websites such as this Thrive site, RossHill.com.au, and Wikipedia. It might be a good idea to start looking for more varied places to get links from.
Your statistics can give you plenty of ideas to refine your site even further. When was the last time that you checked yours?