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 have always been a bit lost when it comes to Twitter. I started off using it by following a few people who had blogs I read, but because I was only following these few people, I was pretty much getting their blog posts recycled back to me.

A short while ago, twitter bought Summarize, and turned it into search.twitter.com. This tool is very useful for quite a few reasons. First of all, you can search for your niche topics (like optimizing AdSense), and find people who have either just posted, or who are interested in your topic. This is similar to searching on Google, but there are some added benefits.

First of all, the content is much fresher, as many of Google’s results will be years old (although some of those can be good too). Second, if people are asking questions or are having difficulty with something, you can respond to them directly and immediately. So not only are you finding good resources, but you are establishing yourself in a community of people interested in the same topics as yourself.

As you begin to find these people on Twitter who share your interests, you can refer them to your posts, and if you have good enough content, gain some dedicated readers.

Digging around the YieldBuild Blog, I just noticed a Trackback from “Optimize AdSense for your Blog”. Considering I am trying to find other bloggers in this niche, I followed the link to their site, and found that they are a blog that only writes snippets of other people’s blogs. The great thing is that all the posts are AdSense related. Not all of the articles are things I am interested in, as much of it is very basic, but it looks like I will be able to find many other bloggers through this resource that are writing about some of the same things I am.

I have been looking for some sort of centralized directory, but have been unable to find all of the bloggers out there who talk about AdSense. Both Digg and Technorati had very little in the way of “optimizing adsense”. So I am happy to have found this resource, and will definitely be looking around it for a while. I will let you know what comes out of it.

When I first started this blog, I had two main categories I was interested in: optimizing AdSense, and cooking. So far I have written quite a bit about the first topic, mothing about the second topic, and various posts about a few other topics.

There are a few questions I have, but am not exactly sure what yw “best” approach is, or what by approach should be. Everyone who looks into the matter knows that getting your self into a tightly defined niche is one of the best ways to establish traffic and a community. But what about the question of closely related niches and extremely different niches? It makes sense for me to talk about SEO and getting traffic, because anyone interested in opitimizing AdSense should also be interested in these topics.

Some of these people might even me interested in cooking, or rockclimbing, or other of my passions, although that number probably won’t be large. The reverse is even more true: if I attract a following of cooks, most will not be interested in SEO or AdSense.

But can this problem be solved merely by categorizing an tagging my posts in a well organized matter? Or should I create a completely seperate blog for those other interests. I know people like Dave Winer (http://www.scriptingnews.com) often combine anything they are interested together on their blog, such as technology, politics, and communities.

I’m sure as I do more of this, I will get more comfortable writing whatever I want to be writing, but I also think that since this blog is for a community of people, I should occasionally (or constantly) reach out to find what others want.

Every single site that used AdSense could be monitizing better, but by how much? Many sites that I have worked with have increased monetization by over 50% with a few minor tweaks, and have more than doubled revenue when we really worked on it.

There is so much money out there, and it is rather astonishing to me that there are not more resources available to inform people of proper techniques, or give ideas of what to do. It seems to me that if people were aware of the situation, there would be a ton of interest in the topic.

Considering my blog is on this very topic, I have been researching to see what other people are saying on the matter. There are definitely a few good resources out there, but it seems like much of the rest just repeats the same few things about using the correct unit sizes, blending or contrasting with your site colors, or following Google’s heatmap. Not that these are bad ideas, but there is so much else you can do, and there is not enough focus on testing.

The amount that has been written on topics like SEO or affiliate marketing completely dwarfs that of proper AdSense technique that could very easily make you way more money. Every SEO guide out there will tell you to find a niche, hopefully one that doesn’t have too much competition, and write as much as you can about it.

Well, I think I found my niche, and I can’t find any competition. I hope that I will eventually be able to get enough people interested in this topic so that we can begin to have conversations, and everyone can learn more.