The Tulip Search Mystery

I don’t generate a huge amount of traffic on my site, but I’m proud of the traffic that I do get. But I did notice something weird. Let’s take a look.

Okay, so for a site that I just started, I’m happy that I’m getting a reasonable amount of traffic. I’ll attribute that to either decent content or shameless plugs in forums. But I couldn’t help but notice that “Tuliptime in Holland, MI” was my most active post. And if you look at the search terms that people use to get to my site, you’ll see that most of them are related to tulips:

Well first, welcome! if you happen upon my page by searching for tulips. And second, how on Earth did you get here?

You see, I went to Google and searched for “tulips.” I figured if a bunch of casual searchers could find my site by searching for “tulips,” then I could too. Searching for “tulips” gave me 14,900,000 hits. When I scanned the search results, I looked through 20 pages of tulips (not necessarily a bad thing), and I could not find a link to my site.

Then, I thought, “well maybe a Google image search is how people end up here.” So I searched for “tulips” in Google images. Let me say, there are a lot of pretty pictures of tulips on the web. Low and behold, 19 pages into Google image search, I found a link to my site:

But 19 pages is a lot of pages to go through. So, while I was able to get to my site, I still have two questions:

1. Why do searchers click my picture of tulips when there are so many other pretty tulip pictures on Google images?
   
2. Do searchers really dig through 19 + pages of Google images to find a good picture of tulips?

Maybe some things in life are destined to remain a mystery, but if anyone can fill me in on the answer to some of these questions, I would appreciate it!

But for now, here’s a link to a better quality picture of the infamous tulips for all you tulip searchers out there.