Tastybuds

Users who come to your site via Google, and other search engines, are much different than users who come directly to your site. Organic users know they are coming to your site and are familiar with it. Search users, on the other hand, are looking for something specific, which they may or may not find on your site.

Because these users are so different from each other, you should optimize your pages for each type of user. You can have different navigation structures, extra information for search users, special deals, or simply rearrange what you do have. It is difficult to know exactly what works best, but keep your key metrics in mind, segregate your audience, and optimize each one.

Even for something like AdSense, which you might believe has an overall “best” style and position should be tested for each type of user. You will often find that what performs better for one group of users will be quite a bit different than what performs for others.

Also, you might have different goals for organic users than for search engine users. For search engine traffic, you may want to drive them to register on your site; or you may want to immediately monetize them as best as possible; or you may want to lead them to a key information page. Whatever your goals, realize that they may differ for each audience segment.

A simple method to do this sort of testing is to cookie users that came directly from www.google.com, or any other sites you would like to segment. Then, for each page you display, and for your tracking software, look at the cookie, and act accordingly. Run the same exact test on both sets of users, and you may find the best result is different for each.

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.

It’s been about 10 days since I started this blog, and although I am starting to get used to it, and have learned a bit, I still am not getting the kind of traffic or participation that I would like. I think what it boils down to is that I have had quite a few superficial posts, and have still not wrote enough true articles.

I realized this lack of good content when I started reading and thinking about methods to get users to this site. One technique which I have read quite a bit about and believe in is submitting articles to other websites. Not only do those articles contribute inbound links, which helps with PageRank, and getting on the search engines, but it also is another outlet for your content, and it can drive interested readers your way.

So I went out hunting for article submission sites, and reading what people recommended in this arena. What it boiled down to is that there are a massive amount of article directories out there, many of which are complete spam, but also a good handful of sites that everyone seems to be recommending, such as www.ezinearticles.com. Some people recommended submitting to only the best, while others say to spread your content as far out as you can. I will probably try a mix of the methods, but there is still one problem: a lack of good content.

When I got to looking through my posts and deciding what I wanted to submit, I realized that I only had 1, maybe 2 articles that were informative and thoughtful enough to send out. This is out of my 25 or so posts that I currently have. So with that I decided that I really need to get back to what I have always heard, and get to writing tons of good content.

My hope is to get 5 or so good articles in the next few days that I can submit to 5 sites, and see where that takes me. Not only will I be playing the inbound link game, but I will also be building my own site into a place people will want to stay at.

Considering none of my traffic has come from search engines so far, I am now fairly convinced that it is essential to cultivate other methods.  This post is mainly to insert my Technorati Profile, which I needed to do to get my Blog listed over there. I have heard about Technorati quite a bit, and know it is a central area for bloggers, but I have never really used it. I will let you know what I think.

Other things which seem to be extremely important for getting traffic:

1. Commenting on other people’s blogs
2. Writing about other people’s posts (and getting a Trackback)
3. Digging stories
4. Twittering and Friendfeeding with people

The first 3 I have already started, and the 4th I am trying to get into, but I still don’t even really know who I should be following, or what exactly to write about on those microblogging platforms.

Let me know if you have other tips, or what you think the most important thing is to get traffic.

After 4 days of getting everything set up, and writting as much as possible, Google Analytics I’d finally reporting that I an getting traffic. Granted, it is only 2 visitors (from Australia and Arizona), and they both bounced, nut I’ve got to start somewhere.

So far I have been writing only about what I am interested in, and about topics which I think might be interesting to others. I haven’t really been playing the SEO game much, although I might start to a bit. However, I will have to be careful, as I am writing this blog to get people involved, not search engines.

However, to get those people, I have to start somewhere, and that usually means getting Google to like my site. I have installed the “All In One SEO” plugin, a Google Sitemap Plugin, and a plugin to help with tagging my posts. Next I will focus on the actual writing aspects of SEO. In doing so, I will probably start writing quite a bit about SEO, which is now one of my new categories.