SEO Case Studies
The Power of Social Media
May 6, 2008 - I have had a few posts with images up for approximately 20 hours now and there are some noteable short-term results. This post on www.allweirdnews.com has generated the most interest. So far I have had 2,163 visitors enter on that page . Considering this blog had a healthy 4,000 visits in total last month, this windfall of instant traffic is very impressive. I decided to make a new post with another image but this is of one that has been around for a while, see the post here. This one has only been up for 45 minutes and has already generated 486 visits, amazing, this one might do better than the first. It seems I have another winner with this post, so far 375 visits in just 25 minutes.
Here are some of the other results, for this post here in the past 45 hours I have received 581 visits, that is not great but it is to a blog that had only 400 visits total in the past 4 months. Another one that did not do very well is this post here, bringing in only 74 visits in the past 45 hours. So far my conclusion is: this type of promotion is quite powerful but very unpredictable. I will update these stats to see how thing progress and will not do any link building on these sites for the next 4 weeks to see if the social media promotion brings in backlinks.
May 2008 - I have decided to do some testing on driving traffic and building backlinks using social media sites. I am a member in good standing on some of the most popular sites, StumbleUpon, Digg, Milk and Cookies, Reddit and Del.icio.us - I am going to leverage my social media accounts and see if I can drive traffic and build backlinks virally. I am going to test two methods, one is using older popular content (I will be using images so I can also test out and optimize for Google images) and one is using more unique content from a photoshop editing site (with permission of the authors). I know the results won’t exactly be scientific in nature but they should give me a good idea on the effectiveness of using social media in SEO and SEM. I should mention a couple of things, social media traffic is generally know for not clicking any ads (so I won’t expect any) also their bookmarking ratio is much lower, so instead of 1 in 4 it might be closer to 15%-20%.
Search Engine Rank Comparision
May 11, 2008 - It is time to make an important SEO decision, well, it is kind of obvious but I like to contemplate every SEO move I make when a site is already performing so well in the SERP’s. As you can see below I am ranking 3rd on Google for my major keyword “Crazy News” - Less importantly I am ranking 23rd on Yahoo for that phrase (Yahoo has and will in the foreseeable future offer 1/10th of the traffic of Google).
Google SERP for ”Crazy News”
Yahoo SERP for “Crazy News”
One change that is screaming to be done - is that all the sites above and around me have the word ‘Crazy’ in their domain name and/or title, and I don’t. I am not one to mess with success on a whim but I do see that coveted number 1 position within reach. My plan is to wait for the first of next month and then change the title tag to include the word ‘Crazy’ to see if it is enough to move me up to 1st position. Sometimes the SERP’s get shaken up quite a bit when you change title tags so I will wait till the beginning of next month so I can closely monitor the results on a clean traffic slate. In the meantime I will also spend a little time building some extra links to help with my push to 1st.
April 2008 - This past month saw another nice bump in traffic with the average visits going to 140 a day. I currently rank number 3 on the first page of results on Google for the phrase “Crazy News”, number one is the site CrazyNews.com and just below me is CrazyNews.net - I will embark on some more link building this month and see if I can grab that number 2 or 1 spot so I can compare the traffic results. My main keyword phrase ‘crazy news’ is at a healthy 49.9% and I am pleased to see that ‘other phrases’ accounts for 29.5% of total search engine traffic. What that means is that there is probably some ‘keyword gold’ in there and I should be able to leverage those in the future. A close look at ‘other phrases’ can reveal patterns of keywords that can make a huge difference in overall traffic. There are a lot of SEO’s that will tell you that the holy grail is first position for one of your industries top 3 keywords and they are right, but achieving that can be just like the search for the holy grail, long, frustrating and more often than not leading to failure. A website can be very successful by looking for quality search engine traffic in more unlikely (and less competitive) places.
March 2008 - Average daily visitors is over 100 now and my keyword phrase ‘crazy news’ accounted for 42% of my search engine traffic. Because of my expanded targeting of keywords the phrases “weird news stories” and “strange news stories” have moved into second and third place with 7.9% and 5.9% respectively. I am making a note of a couple more categories drawing some traffic, weird criminals and crazy people, those could be important on my 6 month SEO review.
Feb 2008 - Analyzing the statistics for February I saw a solid doubling of visits to an average of 60 per day and I also started to see some search hits entering on internal category pages like, ‘odd animals’ and off-beat stuff. I made a note of that so I could do some further research on those keywords and perhaps leverage those internal categories to bring in more traffic. A good SEO will always pay attention to an entire websites and not just the home page, that is one of the biggest mistakes that can be made. Search percentages for my two main keyword phrases held steady. My percent of search engine traffic was a tad below 25% and my keywords ‘crazy news’ (22.9) and ‘crazy news stories’ (4.2%). I decided to target a few other keyword phrases in this genre to try and improve overall traffic. I still wanted to concentrate on my new main keyword ‘crazy’ because I wanted to be able to compare my results to my other site www.VeryWeirdNews.com but I also want to use common sense and make this project a success.
Jan. 2008 - I have decided to launch a new blog with a similar topic to www.VeryWeirdNews.com, this one is called www.AllWeirdNews.com - My idea was to launch a similar site but to target a different set of keywords and see if I could duplicate my success. I used a similar posting pattern of basically one or two new posts per month and also built backlinks in a similar way using free and paid directory submissions, blog comments, blogroll links, content links and a very limited number of paid ads. I also submitted a few stories to various social bookmarking sites. By the end of the first month I was getting a small amount of traffic (averaging around 30 visits a day) and was getting search hits for my new keywords ‘crazy news’ (23.7) and ‘crazy news stories’ (9.4%).
Search Engine Rank for Comeptitive Keywords
May 3, 2008 - Wow quick action by Google and quick results. I just checked the search position for my top two phrases and I am back and looking good! For the phrase ‘weird news’ I am at the top of page 3 (another data center showed me 17th and on page 2) and for ’strange news’ I am in 8th spot on page one. I will keep a close eye on these and probably do a bit of link building this month to ensure I continue to hold solid positions.
May 2, 2008 - January, February and March saw average monthly visitors of around 16,000 - I have not been spending anytime on this site recently and was letting it run on autopilot. While checking stats at the end of last month I noticed a 50% dip in search engine traffic, mostly from Google and became concerned. It seems my home page was dropped from the index. I started investigating and found that someone had uploaded a large block of hidden text into my header file. I contacted Google with a reconsideration request and so far things are looking positive. They were quite understanding and replied quicky to my concern. They quoted me another block of hidden text in one of their replies and I have been manually searching through every single file on my server to find it. I suspect it was part of the original spam I found but I did not notice that particular block because the whole thing was so huge. In retrospect I should have pasted it into a word document so I could examine it further, but I was so upset at that time that I just deleted it. This is my first reconsideration request so I will document it closely as I am sure many others will be interested in the details and outcome.
Dec. 1, 2007 - November turned out to be a monster month with over 18,000 unique visitors. A combination of traffic from Stumbleupon and Reddit were the catalysts. My promotion of the anchor text ‘odd’ and ‘odd news’ started to show a little upswing last month but I should see more positive results this coming month. I have moved up to search rank spot 12 on Google for the term ‘odd news’. And I moved into 7th spot for the term ‘weird news’ and am holding the number 2 spot for ’strange news’. I am very pleased with these results and will continue building links for all three keyword phrases.
Nov. 3, 2007 - My SEO work on www.VeryWeirdNews.com has been very successful. In Sept. I had a healthy unique visitor count of 2,234 with 4,090 total visits. But after a few weeks of hard-work which included directory submissions, link exchanges, a few purchased ads and some on page SEO I was rewarded with the following stats for Oct. - 6,016 unique visitors and 8,927 total visits. Search engine traffic accounted for 31.8% of my total visitors and the term ‘weird news’ accounted for 1,106 of those search engine hits. To further illustrate the success I have had with my SEO work on this blog I am now on page one in rank 8 of Google for the search term “weird news” and that is out of 1,340,000 results (in quotations). For the second best term “strange news” I am in position 5 of the first page out of 1,480,00 results (in quotations). The next competitive term I will try and rank for is “odd news”, I am currently in spot 23 overall and my goal will be the first page for this term by the end of January. My site is averaging around 350 visits a day and if I continue to hold my spots and move up with a couple of new terms I should be able to level off around 500-600 a day by early next year. For reference in Oct. the searched word “odd” accounted for around 2% of total searches and the terms “odd news” .5% and “odd news stories” another .5%.
Sept. 16, 2007 - I have been keeping an eye on one of my more successful blogs lately and am ranking well for a decent traffic term but after some research I decided there is another better term I would like to rank for and I have began building links using some alternate anchor text, which is quite easy since the new term is part of the domain name. The blog is my Weird News Blog, www.VeryWeirdNews.com and the term is ‘Weird News’. I also noticed some traffic for a few lesser keyword phrases so I will be mixing up the anchor text with those extra words to try and nudge them up the SERP’s.
Unique Use of New Google Product
Aug. 29, 2007 - So far this month I have had 355 searches completed and a grand total of over 2,100 since inception. I am basically letting this site grow organically from now on but I will still do a little promotion once-in-a-while. I am very pleased with these results and will start doing some SEO after the next Google update to see if I can score some good positions for related search terms.
May 16, 2007 - It has been three months since I began my project of incorporating Google Co-op Search and Googlepages. I have just cruised past the 900 search mark today and the google page site now has a page rank of 4. I have decided to add some more content to the site and also step up the promotion. I am now only including search results for my own sites and those of my promotional partners. I don’t really have a way of tracking how many conversions I get from searches performed through my search box but I am guesstimating the rate should be fairly high because of the specialized nature of the search. The search engine popularity tools are now showing over 4,000 backlinks in the major search engines and my search box now shows on approximately 18 websites. I have decided to only show my websites and those of my promotional partners in the search results. Originally I was showing Google results with my sites weighted more heavily and I was using the ‘omit site from results’ option to further skew the results in my favour but I found it was too time consuming to keep my directory results on the first page. So far this case study has been a great success and I even noticed that 10% of my adsense income from last month was dervived from my search box results. I am going to continue promoting this search engine and am now actively seeking parnters to display my search box in exchange for listings in the results pages. I have also added three new pages to the search site,
February 16, 2007 - I began doing some research into a new and interesting product Google is offering called Co-op Search. I was trying to think of how I might be able to leverage this powerful (and free) tool to help increase the income on my other sites (mainly my directories). I decided to create three different types of co-op search engines and use Google Pages (another free Google service) to aid in promoting them. I already had success with my very first Google Pages project, Best and Worst of the Web. This site has obtained a page rank of 4 and recieves some regular traffic and has earned me a few bucks through Google Adsense and other text link promotions. Thus far I have only really been able to concentrate on one of the co-op search engines, you can see it here.
Viral Video Success
I began the promotion on July 28, 2006 and as you can see by the traffic report below the results were instantaneous. As of writing this page on Aug. 1, 2006 I have brought in over 45,000 new visitors and Awstats is reporting more than 7,600 of those visitors have book-marked my site in their favorites. Viral promotion can be unpredictable so I won’t expect the same results each time. The results from this promotion would be considered above average.
Aug. 4, 2006 - So far the site has received an additional 11,600 visits to bring the grand total for the eight days to 56,600 with an additional 1,700 book-marks added.
Aug. 10, 2006 - So far the site has received an additional 6,700 visits to bring the grand total for the twelve days to 63,300 with an additional 900 book-marks added.
Aug. 28, 2006 - It has now been one month since my initial traffic surge from getting to number one on digg.com. The post has received a place on the first page of ‘top videos of the year’ so I am hoping for more residual traffic. Although traffic has gone down quite a bit it is still averaging around 5x-10x higher per day than before my promotion.
August 1, 2006 - Recently I have been further developing my viral marketing techniques mostly through social bookmarking sites. It has taken a few months to develop a solid base reputation on my various accounts but it has started to really pay-off well. I recently decided to further promote one of my blogs www.2BlogGadgets.com. Good page rank has been achieved through aggressive backlink building and I have been able to sell over 85% of the available advertising to generate revenue. Traffic has been building slowly but steadily for the past few months but I really wanted to achieve a new (and substantial) influx of first-time visitors. It was the perfect opportunity to leverage my viral marketing techniques.
Update Sept. 28, 2006 - The site traffic has pretty much stabilized at 250-300 uniques a day and has achieved a ton of backlinks in MSN and Yahoo search because of other blogs and sites linking via the Digg.com post. Adsense revenue has been minimal because most of these visitors don’t click ads. All-in-all it has been a great run and I just sold this site.
