Browsing Category: "Blogging for Traffic"
We all know Google basically owns the World Wide Web, at least a majority of it but that doesn’t mean you can’t get traffic from other search engines.
I know some you guys live by Google and will probably die by Google but seriously, you can actually get great traffic from smaller search engines. I see so many people worrying so much about their Pagerank and how it can drastically affect their search engine results. Well, let me tell you, it doesn’t have the type of impact you may think.
I’ll give you an example. I built a niche HTML site just so I can rank high in a specific keyword, have a one time setup and basically do nothing else while generating traffic and revenue at the same time. My site actually wasn’t even indexed in Google search engines but I decided not to let that hold me back so I started building links for that site.
After a few days, my site still wasn’t indexed in Google but yet I was getting pretty steady traffic flowing in and I started seeing my Adsense increase and stay steady for that span. Of course, I was curious as hell so I checked where all my traffic was coming in from and besides certain social bookmarking sites, a large majority of traffic was coming from Yahoo, MSN and even some smaller search engines I never even heard of before.
See, I may not have been indexed in Google but because I started to build links to that site, it was picked up by tons of other search engines. I even ranked on the first page on a bunch of them for the keyword I was targeting which is what has been helping me out.
I just checked earlier today and this specific HTML site I mentioned has a few pages finally indexed with Google but not the entire site, just yet.
I know a lot of you guys breathe and live Google but you just have to remember there are plenty of alternatives. I didn’t expect to get any search engine traffic with my niche HTML site since it wasn’t indexed with the big G, but I was proven wrong.
And honestly, I’m glad I was proven wrong this time!
So, if you can’t seem to rank on the first page of a popular keyword with Google, don’t stop building links because the more links you have the more it will help you with other search engines.
Who knows? Maybe you’ll end up on the first page of the keyword of your choice with every single search engine out there! You’d be amazed…
Everyone has their own way of doing keyword research and we all know how much keyword research can make a difference with our SEO, so I figured I’d show you a little bit on how I do my own keyword research.
As a lot of you guys already know, I own quite a few sites and for some reason that list keeps getting longer and longer each week. I swear I’m buying a domain name every week but that’s mainly because if I get an idea or a great opportunity that I think will help me in the near future I’m going to run with it.
For instance, I would hate to second guess myself on something and beat myself up a short time later when someone else swoops in to steal my domain name and idea and make thousands off of it. I mean .COM domains only cost around $6.00 USD so you’re not wasting much.
Now this is kind of how I do my keyword research but it all depends on which site I’m trying to do it for. I’m just going to go over the basics so I can generalize it so any niche can do this.
Finding the trends:
Finding the most popular trends that’s going on now can drastically improve your traffic, for the short term as well as the long.
For example, when Iron Man the movie came out, everyone was interested in the Iron Man Spoiler especially because there was a scene at the very end of the credits. Personally, I’ve gotten thousands of search engine visitors from that keyword alone. Though, that was only temporary because everyone eventually found out what happened (the movie was extremely popular).
A few things you can use to look up are popular trends are Google Trends and Yahoo Buzz which one shows popular search terms per day and the other shows the top 10 searches by hour.
Finding the Keywords:
Once you find the hot trends that you would like to write and optimize with, you want to check the various keywords to work with. What I like to use is the SEObook Keyword Tools which is extremely helpful. Let’s stay with the Iron Man example for this one. If you type in “Iron Man” you’ll see an entire list of different variations of Iron Man keywords that are highly searched for (see screenshot below – you can click on it to make it bigger).
If you don’t link to other bloggers’ post, well, you’re selfish. Lol but seriously, if you do, you’ll help your fellow bloggers out and networking is always good; but more importantly so is the traffic you get while you’re linking to them.
As a lot of you guys know, I’ve been trying to do a weekly roundup to post links on interesting articles I have stumbled across through the blogosphere. I did this to help gain exposure to fellow bloggers, hopefully they’re notice and realize I’m trying to network and help them out with the intent they might return the favor one day and of course, it gives some pretty decent traffic on top of that!
You get traffic from linking to their posts?
If you guys didn’t know that, you’re definitely missing out. I decided to start the weekly roundup as a mini experiment on how much traffic I can get from simply linking to other blog posts.
The stats aren’t as accurate as I’d like but it’s more of an estimate anyways. Since I started doing the weekly roundups, I’ve gotten a little more than 400 visitors from the blogs that I have linked to.
You’re probably asking how? And if you’re not, I’m going to tell you anyways. Well, it’s simple. You want to link to various blogs that has the pingbacks enabled on their comments. Once it is on there, anyone else commenting thereafter will see the pingback with a quick summary of your post and as the stats show, there are people interested enough to check it out.
Again, the stats are just an estimate, especially the fact that I only had three Weekly Roundups prior to yesterdays. I also figured I’d implement this strategy on another blog which is fairly new and doesn’t get too much traffic. And I linked to one pretty popular blog and in less than a few hours, I ended up getting 30+ visitors from that one site.
Here some quick tips that may help if you’re considering this method:
The other day I wrote “Search Engine Traffic = More Money and More RSS Subscribers” but I only mentioned how search engine traffic can increase RSS Feed subscribers (even though some people were simply distracted by the pics of Beyonce), well, let me write about the making more money part of it.
Before I continue with how search engine traffic can make you more money, for the record, after I wrote the first post about how search engine traffic can help gain more RSS Feed subscribers, I implemented that strategy on a few posts with popular keywords and I have gained about 35 e-mail subscribers excluding ones counted for my current Market Leverage Nintendo Wii contest .
Honestly, I think most of this stuff is self-explanatory but if there are a lot of people who still have no idea what RSS Feeds are then there must be a lot of people who have no idea that search engine traffic is what helps bloggers make money.
First, let’s start off with Google Adsense. I think a majority of bloggers rely on Adsense ads to make money from their blogs, yet, some of those same bloggers complain why no one clicks on their ads. Do you know why? It’s because those people do not get search engine traffic . Or at least not enough.
If you think about it, your fellow readers most likely aren’t the ones who will be clicking on those ads, it’s the people who end up on your site looking for something specific. The ones that were in search for something to begin with. Of course if they don’t find what they’re looking for, those ads are right there to entice them to continue their search without going through the search engine process all over again.
I continually see people questioning why they only make $0.02 a day from adsense but they supposedly get thousands of visitors a day. When people say stuff like that, more than likely they only know how to get traffic from social media sites like StumpleUpon, Digg, etc.
Guess what? People from social media sites don’t click on adsense ads . And if they do, more than likely they hate your site so much they’re trying to get you banned from Google.
Google updated its pagerank and all I have to say is: Google Pagerank is just a number, who cares? I’ve been preaching that for a while because it won’t stop traffic from coming to your site, you’ll still be listed in search engines and if you’re good enough at SEO, then you should have no problem.
For instance, a friend of mine recently got knocked down to a PR0 and you would think it affected his search engine traffic but nope, it didn’t. He still gets thousands of uniques each day.
So, like I said, Google Pagerank is just a number, who cares?
I checked and it looks like a couple of my sites got knocked down from PR4 to PR3 – including DatMoney.com – but a few of my newer blogs got PR2 from PR0. But when it came down to it, none of my search engine traffic got affected by this update either.
What I’m trying to say is, don’t rely on Pagerank so much because it’s not that important. I know a bunch of people who has PR5’s but they barely get search engine traffic. On the other hand, I know people who have no pagerank at all that gets thousands of search engine traffic still… so I guess when it comes down to it, if you know SEO then you’re all set.
And if you don’t, pagerank or no pagerank, it’s not going to help you either way.
