Posted 7/15/08

Mitchell Blatt, owner of Juiced Sports Blog and active stumbler.  Add him here to improve your Stumble profile and success.

How I Increased SE traffic by 400% a few weeks ago.

Yes, I increased my search engine traffic by a lot this month, but sadly it is now dying down.  People aren’t searching for CC Sabathia much anymore… However, it did help me a lot while it lasted.

I had written quite a few posts about Sabathia in the weeks leading up to his trade.  Since I had already written about the fact that he was getting traded before it was big news, Google noted me as an authority for CC, so my posts ranked high for keywords like “Sabathia trade” even after the competition got higher when the trade actually went down.

Going into the Sabathia trade, I had the advantage of having a friend doing some anonymous source work on the trade, so I reported on June 23 that Sabathia would get traded here and had a few updates: Sabathia posts.  However, even if you didn’t have an inside source, you could have written about the rumors.  If you have posts early on, weeks before news breaks, that have some age and some links, you will get a boost when that news does break.

Here are some of my SE numbers for various keywords the week of the trade:

Sabathia trade-102

Cc sabathia trade-69

Cc sabathia traded-27

c.c. sabathia trade-24

cc sabathia trade rumors-22

sabathia traded-20

Now, I only had one keyword in the triple digits, but I had a total of 222 keywords containing the word “sabathia.”  You really hit the long-tail when reporting news stories, so I had keywords like “who will sabathia” and “what about the sabathia trade?”  Google analytics even gave me credit for getting hits from “cc sabathia traded to dodgers,” even though it listed 0 hits from that keyword.

I also had a report on how the player to be named is going to be Taylor Green, so I got 210 visits from Taylor Green-related keywords, including the inane keyword “+ ‘c.c. sabathia” + trade ‘+taylor green’”

Another good thing about ranking high for newsworthy keywords is that you get linked by people who searched for the news, so I got linked by Scout.com a few times and a lot of other blogs.

So, If you want to build search engine traffic, one strategy is to look to the future, and optimize for that.

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