Don't Put All Your Money Making Traffic In One Basket

The lesson I've given myself today is a reminder that I should never put all of my eggs in one basket. In this case the basket relates to traffic sources. Oh, and another other thing as well is that I mustn't get too complacent.

On lots of my blogs my biggest referrer is Google and it was driven home to me that this is a little dangerous. Fall out with Google, or if they dramatically alter their algorithm, and my traffic could take a dive.

A while back I wrote how, on my blog about television presenter Konnie Huq, the traffic collapsed when the blog was no longer on the first Google search page and their referrals stopped overnight. Not only that but AdSense would no longer appear.

As far as I can see it wasn't anything I had done. Konnie Huq made a comment about human rights in China and I quoted this in a post. This brought me over 4000 hits in one day and most were from China. They left hundreds of vitriolic and obscene comments about Konnie.

Google mustn't have liked this so bang went the blog's search engine placing - it disappeared completely and referrals stopped as did the AdSense ads.

Things for the blog have now improved slightly and I get Google referrals again now and just this week I've been able to get AdSense ads on there again.

But now I've had another blog hit! I was getting about 700 average hits a day and half of these came from the Google search engine. Wham bang, overnight all of these referrals disappeared completely and from a steady 700 hits a day the blog is now getting just 350.

If this second blog will correct itself in time, I've no idea.

To me though the message is clear: Don't rely on one major source for traffic and continually work at finding new avenues that will refer hits.

To get things in perspective I've got over 50 blogs and this has only happened to two of them. I find it annoying, however, that there are powers out there that hold the success of blogs in the palm of their hands. Nice to use a good cliche!

But it makes life interesting. Get behind me complacency.

Good luck,
Mike.

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Be Careful Of The Search Engine Censors

Be careful as to what readers' write in your comments.

This is my reason for saying this.

As I've written previously I like to experiment with different blogs and try various things out. In doing so, a while back, I started a basic blog about a British television presenter Konnie Huq.

It never really took off as she wasn't in the news very much. The blog averaged only about 125 visitors a day. These mostly arrived from the Google search engine as the blog was always on the front page for keywords "Konnie Huq" and various other combinations.

Everything ticked over okay and I only updated the posts once in a while.

Then 10 days ago the blog had over 4000 visitors in 24 hours.

"Great," you might think but a strange thing happened. The blog no longer appeared on the Google search engine's first page, or the second, or the third. In fact I couldn't find it on the search engine.

To my own satisfaction I believe I have discovered as to why this was. These 4000+ visitors left over 80 comments and most of them were from China.

They were upset because Konnie Huq was chosen to carry the Olympic torch in London but spoke out about 'human rights' in China and the Tibet issue.

Most of the Chinese were furious at what she had said and the comments they left were racist, threatening and generally awful.

And I believe this is why the blog was no longer on the Google search first page.

I left the comments initially thinking that these said more about the writers than anything I could have said myself. And I don't really believe in censorship (within certain parameters).

However, seeing my problem with Google I eventually removed the offending comments.

Guess what?

The blog is now back on the Google first page in 8th position!

Okay it was previously higher but the removal of the comments did the trick. And that's why I said, at the beginning of this post, to be careful as to what is written within comments on your blog. There are forms of censorship and control all around us!

Good luck,
Mike.

Keywords, Images & Konnie Huq Again

I'm following on from yesterday's post today but mainly focusing on keywords.

I've written before about the value of having secondary keywords alongside your main keyword (or phrase). This way you can compete with the 'big boys'.

Yesterday I mentioned Konnie Huq. If I put her name into Google my blog, as you would imagine, is nowhere in the listings - at least not on the first couple of pages. But, if you remember, I also said yesterday that my keywords alongside 'Konnie Huq' were 'low + cut + dress'.

If I put 'Konnie Huq dress' into Google this blog is in on the first page, in second position. For 'Konnie Huq low cut' this blog is also on the first page.

And before anyone says that it's unlikely searches will be made with the keywords mentioned - well people have! The reason being is that the main news story yesterday in the UK, about Konnie, was because she was wearing a very low cut dress to a film premier. If she'd been out and about in jeans and a t-shirt she wouldn't have been a news story and people wouldn't have searched her name. It was the dress that was as much the news as Konnie herself. It's necessary to pick out the essence of a news story as keywords.

The above also illustrates once again, as with Kate Middleton, that if you post about hot topics you'll get extra visitors via search engines and also from Technorati tags (providing you use them, of course). It also shows how quickly you can get on Google if you do things the right way - exploit what's hot.

Moving on slightly, I would recommend that you have a tracker which shows the keywords search engines have used to send traffic to your blog. If your counter/tracker doesn't do this try eXTReMe Tracking - they list all keywords.

From this list you can then see what words are working for you. Sometimes this may be because you have written about something specific. If you see certain keywords are working, because of the subject matter of a post you have published, you can then do a follow up on the same theme. This will most likely get further search engine referrals.

The old cliche is right: Give people what they want, not what you think they want. You can judge this, to a degree, by looking at your tracker's list of keywords.

One more thing ...

About images, as per yesterdays post. Shane has left me a comment to say: 'You should use dashes instead of underscores to separate the words, since search engines don't see underscores as spaces.' He mentioned this as I wrote about how photos/images should have proper keyword titles. I gave the example of konnie_huq_low_cut_dress. According to Shane I should have used the title konnie-huq-low-cut-dress instead.

After all of this talk about low cut dresses I think it must be time to take a break. Keep an eye on those keywords!

Good luck,
Mike.


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Konnie Huq And An Eureka Moment About Images

I was thinking about keywords, while looking at a friend's blog stats, and suddenly had an Eureka moment. Okay what I'm about to write may be pretty obvious to you but it wasn't for me. The stats I was perusing showed that 13 of her last 20 search engine referrals were from Google Image Search.

It suddenly dawned on me that I wasn't using images properly, even when I did my Kate Middleton experiment. I don't think I've ever had a referral from Google Images so I reckon I'm missing out. It's not easy to bring too many images into a money making blog but, when I do, I want to now try and do this properly to make the photos, or whatever, more attractive to search engines.

Today the UK newspapers are full of photos of Konnie Huq (a children's TV presenter) in a low cut dress while attending a film premier. So I thought I'd use her photo to start out my mission to try and get a few referrals from search engines. My wife thinks I have an ulterior motive for doing this!

This is how I see images should be presented.

(1) The image should have a proper name, not something like 1003.jpg. It needs to say what the photo is all about - obviously with as few words as possible. In my example I've titled the photo konnie_huq_low_cut_dress.

As I see it konnie huq and dress are my keywords. I threw in low cut as this might also be something entered as a search.

(2) I understand that it is search engine friendly to state the size of the photo. In Konnie's case 110 x 200.
Looks like this:
height="200" width ="100"

(3) Alt should be used for your keywords. In my case I'm using the same words as my title. Looks like this:
alt="Konnie Huq in low cut dress".

In case you are not sure, alt creates the words seen when you hover over an image. It was originally used as an alternative to the image in case the photo couldn't be seen.

(4) Don't spam. By this I mean don't use too many keywords in your photo title or alt. This also applies to text - use keywords but do not over use them. It makes search engine's cross!

That's about it, you might know differently. Either way I think it's important that we use every possible trick to get more referrals via search engines. Let's not miss out on images.

Good luck,
Mike.

Further reading:
Kate Middleton Makes Wonderful Bait


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