Posted 7/3/08

Guest post written by Aaron of Daily Basketball; a must read for any serious NBA blogger or fan.

As any statistics-obsessed blogger already knows, there are three types of traffic: direct visitors, referring visitors, and search engine traffic. Gathering direct visitors and referring visitors can be considered an art; write enough quality content, and you'll gain a strong readership and get rewarded with a lot of links. Search engine traffic, however, is a lot more mysterious for many bloggers.

Assuming you'd like to increase your search engine traffic, I'd like to share a hint that has worked well for Daily Basketball in the past.

For a week or so this past June, the most popular page on my blog wasn't the home page. It was "34 Reasons to Cheer for the Boston Celtics". I wondered why this happened, so I check out my trusty stats program. During the NBA Finals, I had over 2000 visits to my site from people searching for "paul pierce."

In contrast, I'm pretty proud of myself ranking #2 on Google for the keywords "basketball blog," but I don't receive a lot of traffic for my high ranking there. Probably one-tenth of what I received compared to the Boston Celtics post a couple weeks ago.


Anyway, on to my hint for bringing search engine traffic to your blog or site. Write posts about keywords with a high-volume of search queries. Spend less time worrying about ranking high for extremely specific terms. The topic should be related to your site, but general in nature.

Let's refer back to the Boston Celtics story above. I couldn't find my blog post in the top five pages of the Google results page for "paul pierce". When you're dealing with extremely high volumes of traffic, you don't need to be on the front page of the results to bring tons of visitors to your site.

One site that can help you find popular search terms is Google Trends. You can find a list of the top 100 search terms for every day. While most aren't relevant, you should be able to find something particularly interesting to the sports audience.

Take a look at your statistics and find what keywords people are using to come across your blog. Hopefully, you'll be able to find the post(s) that brought those readers to your site. Find out where your site ranks well, and what your readers are searching for.

A quick review: remember to find high-volume search keywords. Don't worry about finding your way to the front page of the results. Write your posts about keywords related to your blog that have tens of millions of interested visitors, if not hundreds of millions. Yes, those keywords are out there.

You'll have to experiment, but once you hit the niche, you'll be rewarded with a stream of interested readers.


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