As an SEO, I’m obviously very interested in the traffic that the search engines deliver to any site that I work on. Using tracking systems such as Google Analytics and MyBlogLog I can track the queries used to reach these sites, and results for seotunes.co.uk have been interesting so far.

As anyone who tracks this data will tell you, the keywords that lead to your site can range from the mundane to the bizarre (especially if you have a colourful way with the English language, as my new favourite TV review site Ariel Telly recently discovered - warning: probably NWS!). I’ve yet to rank for anything as profane as those examples (give it time), but my interest has been piqued recently in the amount of hits I’ve been getting for the term “air traffic”.

Now, if I were to have links pointing towards my (less than enthusiastic) review of Air Traffic live at Manchester Academy, and if this site was a little bit older, I’d believe I could get a few hits from a 3rd page (or thereabouts) listing for, say, “air traffic live”. But just “air traffic”? Something is afoot.

On closer inspection, ALL hits for this have been generated from Google.be’s image search. A strange result, consistant hits from a the image section of a foriegn search engine for the name of an (as-yet) relatively under-the-rader British band. So why is this happening?

After a little investigation, it appears that Air Traffic have recently returned from a tour of Belgium and The Netherlands (a lovely party of the world), where they really made some noise. This has led to a spike in searches for pictures of the boys in the google.be and google.nl. Thanks to some appropriate image tagging and quite a lot of early link love (much of it courtesy of Andrew Girdwood of bigmouthmedia - cheers Andy!), the Air Traffic image in my review has been in the first line of Google Image results in the .be search engine, resulting in my Blegian hits.

So, “hallo” to my Belgian visitors! I hope your stay is a pleasant one.