Tastybuds

There are many techniques to try and gain traffic, but it is important to always keep in mind the size of your site. Larger sites should focus on much different things than small sites, and every shade in between has it’s differences.

As a tiny site (less than 10 visits per day), most of my traffic is coming from comments and trackbacks on other blogs. But as I gain in size, search engines will begin to be much more important. Just by writing about my interests I have already gained quite a bit in my SEO rank, but it is time to make a more deliberate effort.

One of the first things you should do is figure out what your niches are, and focus on getting as much content on them as possible. Most people already have a general idea of their niche, but you need to find the keywords and phrases that will define your site. For me, some of my niche keywords are: “optimizing adsense”, “getting more traffic”, and “increase monetization”.

Most people already know what to do once they have these keywords: use them in your titles, tags, categories, and scatter them across your content. But the hard part is coming up with them. It is a delicate balance between using high traffic keywords while trying to stay in areas that are not so competitive.

To help you in this SEO battle, there are two major tooks you should be using, and not suprisingly, both come from Google. First, you should use the Google AdWords Tool to analyze your site, and come up with some high volume keywords. Then, you should use Google Search to see how many search results come up. Trying to use “SEO”, will get you nowhere as a small site, because you have to compete against millions of other sites.

Pick keywords that are appropriate for your website size. Get to the top 10 of a 1000 result keyword and you will pick up a tiny bit of traffic. Then move on to something in the 10,000 result range. For whatever range you are in for number of results (competitors), try and pick the keywords with the most searches. Of course, with all of this, you will have to make sure you know enough about the topic to write a lot of good content.

I am developing a tool that will allow you to feed in keywords and search volumes from Google’s AdWords Tool. It will scour Google Search for each keyword to find how many competitors you have. Then, after recommending which keywords to use, it will track your rank on an ongoing basis to see how you are doing. I will let you know when this tool is available for use.

I just got my first traffic from Google after more than 30 posts. All of my other traffic so far has been from comments or trackbacks from other blogs. But even though the majority of traffic isn’t currently coming from Google, I am guessing that that will change soon.

I should have started earlier, but I just began monitoring where my site ranks with various search terms. This is an extremely important excercise, as it correlates to how often people will find me. A search for “danny gabriner”, currently only ranks third, after my LinkedIn and Facebook profiles. I should be the number one listing, considering that term is my domain, but because I never write it out, and those other two sites are massive, I could see why I am behind.

More imporant terms to monitor ate things like “optimizing adsense”, which is written on every single page, and I often write about. This is a highly competitive search term, and when I first checked, I was number 83 on the list. However, after only a few days, I have jumped to number 28. Once I get into the top 10, I expect quite a bit more traffic from this query.

A related term that gets far more searches is “optimize adsense”. I don’t write this term nearly as much as I should, and currently rank 133. As I become more concious of the important search queries that relate to my topics, I will focus on the SEO factor, and plan on tracking my progress in the Google rankings.

In addition to seeing where I rank on Google, I will be using Google’s AdWords Tool to find the keywords that are most imporant to me. Robert Scoble recently wrote a post on the lack of knowledge of this tool, and he is right that most people could gain heavily from it’s use.

My next steps are to compile my list of important keywords, and then I will start continually tracking and trying to improve my ranking on Google. There are so many SEO techniques that we all know to gain traffic, but this will actually give me a good idea of my progress.