As we enjoy a beautiful, albeit cold, day in the Ozarks it’s appropriate to look back at the year that was and consider the coming year. What stories did you enjoy in 2010? Here’s the Top 10 individual stories:

1 ) BBC Looks At World Cup 2010, Download The Schedule – although posted in Dec 2009, this was the top story on my site for the year, drawing 11,004 unique visitors. It drew traffic from around the world and drew 789 visitors on June 11th!
2 ) Bud United – a shout out to Missouri’s favorite brewer and a reality show related to the World Cup, it was really more of an effort to draw Wil Fischer Companies attention to my blog. Still no sponsorship support though, despite 2304 visitors
3 ) Charlize Theron Picks… Ireland – I try not to pander on this site but when I have a chance to show a photo of Charlize Theron and point to World Cup soccer in one breath, well…it drew 4 hits as recently as December 20th of 1690 total visits
4 ) U17 US Women Defeat And Embrace Haitian Team – the best ‘feel good’ story of the year, 1236 visitors found this story of sportsmanship
5 ) Class 3 District Finals – Glendale Will Face Carthage Tuesday – High School soccer is by far the largest overall traffic producer on my site and controversy has a way of increasing it. This report of the Chiefs loss to Glendale in the Class 3 District 11 Final drew 1076 visitors and required me to contact Kickapoo about the disturbing comments posted from their school.
6 ) AC St Louis Announce Open Men’s Soccer Tryouts – this story pointed to the broad regional readership this site has, drawing 942
7 ) Class 3 District Playoffs – Chiefs, Falcons, Tigers, Eagles, Bulldogs, Bruins! – more High School this story summarizing the Class 3 results was led by the Chiefs demolition of the Tigers and Glendale’s win in PK’s over Nixa. Quite the evening at the Greenwood Stadium Field. 883 visitors.
8 ) 2010 Southwest All-Star Game Girls Roster Announcement – 875 visitors
9 ) Southwest Missouri Sectional Soccer Results – Carthage manhandles Glendale, finally getting to the Quarterfinals after losses to Glendale and Kickapoo the previous two years. 770 visitors.
10 ) Nixa Eagles Advance To District 11 Final – ah, more high school, more controversy. The Lady Eagles are named winners following a week of politics within MSHSAA. 700 visitors.

Overall there were 92,598 unique visitors and almost half-a-million pageviews in 2010. The highest traffic day was Friday June 11th when 1789 visitors stopped by for the start of the World Cup and some Missouri State Cup updates. The slowest day was Christmas Day when 127 of you still found time to surf over my way.

88.7 per cent of the traffic is from the US while the UK led the international crowd with 2%. Australia, with 0.3% had the smallest number of new visitors, maybe due to the Chapman’s friends and family keeping up with Southwest Missouri soccer.

Missouri is 67% of the US traffic with Illinois (4.5%), New York (3.4%), California (3.8%), Texas (2.6%) and Kansas (1.9%) in the Top 6 overall. To the left is the Google Analytics map showing where traffic in Missouri came from along with a list of the Top 10 cities driving traffic. The second Springfield listing has something to do with how IP addresses are being counted, I’ll have to look into that. Click on the photo to see a larger version.

Now that you’ve seen what drew the communities interest, do you have any thoughts about the stories you read on this site? Maybe some suggestions for me for 2011? Leave them in the comments!