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.

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.