Common Blogging Mistakes - Part 2

I didn't finish my rambling yesterday as I was interrupted by a golf game so I thought I would pick up my train of thought today. I've received a number of emails since yesterday asking about the effects changing a blog's title and/or layout would have on existing traffic. This is a good question and it has several possible answers.

I want to use one blog in particular as an example and I hope Ester won't mind. She has a wonderful daily diary style blog called "My Daily Thoughts" and she has asked if she should change the title to "My Days in my Mind" which is her URL title.

The first thing I should mention is that you will certainly see a drop in traffic whenever you change your blog title. This is assuming that you were receiving hits from people searching for your original title. In Ester's case if people were typing in "My Daily Thoughts" in the search engines to find her then changing her title will have a negative effect. I am only guessing however that she probably doesn't get a lot of traffic - I could be wrong though - from people searching for those keywords.

Blog's like Ester's are a challenge to optimize for traffic. They are a pleasure to read when one finds them but are not the sort of thing that people actively search for on the search engines. Diary style journals typically have wide ranging subject matter and attract a readership based on the author's writing style and likability factor rather than a particular subject matter. Search Engine Optimization is based almost exclusively on subject matter and not aesthetics. Now having said that the search engines will index Ester's blog for lots and lots of terms stemming from her post titles and this, I think is where the traffic will come from. Changing her Blog title at this point is not likely to effect her greatly but I should add that changing it to "My Days in my Mind" is not going to benefit her in the long run anymore than her original title from an SEO perspective. The new title is not likely to be searched for anymore than the original.

If I was to optimize her blog for her I would probably zero in on the Personal development niche and use a title like "My Daily Thoughts - A Road to Personal Development" or "My Daily Thoughts in Search of Self-Fulfillment". The point is to include relevant keywords that are searched for in the search engines. This will eventually bring in relevant traffic that she doesn't get presently and it will not negate any traffic she is currently receiving as her original keywords are still being used.

Let me use my blog as an example of how I target keywords using my blog title.
When I started this blog I had a goal in mind - I wanted to take a completely free service such as Blogger and use a free hosting platform (blogspot.com) and see if it was possible to attain page 1 ranking for a highly competitive keyword - "Make Money Online". To do this I had to identify my intended audience and then decide on my best course of action.

I chose to target internet marketing beginners as I believe they are terribly under served online except as potential customers. There are very few quality sites that provide real step by step instructions for beginners using blogs in the field of internet marketing. Even fewer that provide this information for free. I chose to use a free service and host not because this is the best method but because I wanted to show beginners that they can make money online without spending a single dime. This blog has not cost me a single penny so far and it has made me several thousands of dollars over the past 9 months - the majority of it acquired with adsense.

That was the goal I set out to achieve and while I haven't made page 1 yet I am making steady progress. This morning I ranked number 39 out of 200,000,000 sites indexed for "Make Money Online". Number 16 out of 140,000,000 for "How to Make Money Online". These are from Google.ca (Canada) and my ranking will be a page or two lower on Google.com (USA). A side note: you will rank differently on Google depending on which country the search is instigated in.

Now when I started this blog I chose to use "Make Money for Beginners" as my blog title and managed to get these terms for my URL as well. I didn't bother targeting "Make Money Online" at first as this would have been over reaching. When you start out pick keywords that can be attained in a short period of time. By attained I mean ranking on page 1 of the SERP's. I took over top spot for "Make Money for Beginners" in just over a month after start up. This was relatively easy as there are only 2.5 million competing sites for this term. Are there a lot of searches for this term... not really, maybe 10 - 20 per week but it was a good starting point.

The term allowed me to add more keywords as I gained PR and something I call Google Bot Attraction. What this is I can't explain aside from saying that if the Google Bot was human it likes some sites more than others and tends to crawl favorite sites a lot more than less favored sites. Page rank has some effect on this but there has to be other factors as well based on my experience. If I had to guess I suspect quality content is one such factor. This PR2 blog gets crawled more than several PR4 websites I have and my posts usually draw traffic from Google within an hour after posting. Yesterday's post was indexed about 15 minutes after I posted it. For whatever reason the Google bot likes this blog and zooms in and out frequently.

After three months I noticed that I was getting crawled frequently and I changed my Blog title to "Make Money Online for Beginners". The effect was quite rapid. Within a few days I found that I went from page 3 for the term all the way to top spot on page 1 on Google. I also held onto top spot for the previous term "Make Money for Beginners". Pretty cool I thought. I recently added the words "How to" to my title and sure enough I got top spot the following day for "How to Make Money Online for Beginners" as well. Now I can't say that I get a ton of traffic for these exact terms as most people don't add "for Beginners" to the query. However by adding the "Online" and "How to" terms I noticed that my blog moved up drastically in the SERP's for the terms "How to Make Money Online" and "Make Money Online" which are both found in my Title. Although I haven't made page 1 yet I am seeing 20 - 30 visitors a day now for my primary keyword "Make Money Online" and I can only guess what kind of traffic page 1 will bring.

The point of all this is to plan things out in an achievable fashion when starting your blog. Pick your primary keyword and then use "long tail" keywords that compliment your primary keyword as a starting point. As more an more of your long tails' get indexed and achieve high ranking they boost your primary keyword ranking in the process and more importantly bring in traffic for secondary keywords related to your niche. If you only concentrate on your primary keyword you will spend a long time without any traffic at all and find it hard to ever see high rankings. Google wants to see a consistent and sustained pattern of keyword relevancy regarding your subject matter before it will reward you with high rankings.

In the past spamblogs would simply pick a popular keyword like "Lemon Laws" and then proceed to post thousands of pages of drivel using the term "Lemon Laws" over and over again in order to out "Lemon Law" the competition. This fooled Google for a time but now the algorithm wants to know why there aren't other relevant terms for the main subject in the posts. You have to include lots of relevant long tail keywords in your content now or you will be flagged and ignored.

The best way to bolster your Blog title and hence your primary keyword is the often overlooked "blog description" area. With websites this is contained in the Meta Tags and it is now ignored by Google and a few other search engines thanks to keyword stuffing abusers. It is not ignored on blogspot blogs however and is a very powerful aid for getting your secondary keywords ranked.

This is the wording used to describe your blog located right below your Blog Title. I change mine all the time when I want Google to rank me higher for recent popular searches. My Blog Title tells Google that in general this blog is about how to make money online. My description tells Google the specifics of how this is done. When I find popular subjects like "Project Payday" or "Yahoo Answers" I quickly do a little research, write a few posts and then change my description to let Google know that I cover these popular subjects and more importantly I let searchers know it too as my description is displayed in the SERP's. This works like a charm and gets me ranked well for just about any topic I choose. A word of caution though. Each time you make a change there is a delay of a few days to maybe a week that you will see a drop off in traffic as Google drops your rankings for previous terms that you have removed from your description. It usually takes a good week before your new terms are indexed and start drawing traffic.

Ok, I've rambled on enough but before I stop I just want to make a few comments on Google Page Rank and Alexa's traffic stats.

The Page Rank update is long overdue and is frequently discussed online these days. Who knows why it has been so long delayed but quite frankly it is a historical number and is not important save for a few programs like payperpost and such that require a certain page rank before accepting you in. CPA programs are the most notable ones for requiring PR before allowing you to collect leads for them. Advertisers place a lot of stock in it but they really should look at traffic instead. For most people the PR you see is quite useless. It simply shows the PR of a page the last time it was updated but it does not tell you the current PR. My PR is 2 but that was what Google deemed it almost 6 months ago. My current PR is unknown and this is the problem with pagerank in the first place. It is not fluid but static - showing only what you were and not what you are. Don't get hung up on that little green bar.

Alexa is one of the crappiest things to have invaded the online world in my opinion. People live and breathe over it and most don't understand that it is so inaccurate as to traffic that it should be ignored. The numbers it spits out are always contrary to your own traffic stats and this is for a number of reasons; it only gathers data from surfers who have the alexa toolbar installed on their browsers. 99% of all internet surfers don't have this toolbar and have never heard of Alexa. Only techies and internet marketers use it. If you have a site that attracts techies or IM'ers then you probably have a decent Alexa ranking but it still won't reflect your true numbers. If your site is about shoes then you won't have much of a ranking at all. My best niche site has over a thousand visits a day and my alexa rank is 2,000,000 and change. This blog gets about 300 - 400 visitors a day and it ranks 180,000 give or take. Go figure. While you are ignoring the little green Google bar you can just as easily ignore the little blue Alexa bar as well.

Please don't ignore me though...

Cheers

Grizzly