SEO-search engine optimaztion, is the art of getting your site noticed by search engines, most importanly, the Google Search Engine. I have been blogging for a while and a couple of months ago I stumbled upon Showtime’s BlogBuzz section. This was a place to ask Showtime to post a link to blogs talking about their show The Tudors. Hey, I had written a post about The Tudors, so I sent them an email. I went from one or two hits a day, to thirty or forty hits a day. I got something like 500 hits from that one link on Showtime. Cool.
So, being the compulsive obsessive that I am, I started reading all these blog posts on how to drive traffic to your site. Sadly most of them said I needed to write quality content with rich relevant keywords. Hey, wait a minute, I know what a keyword is, as I once had an Adwords account for a couple of months. I can pepper my posts with SEO, SEO, and SEO. Or were they talking about something else? Relevant keywords seems to mean staying on topic, damn.
Then I found a post that said the key to success is submitting stuff to Digg, making Squidoo lens, bookmarking everything you write in Del.icio.us, blink, and Technorati– basically spending all of your time adding your content to social networks. Which is fine, except then you have no time to actually write content as you are spending all of your time submitting to Reddit and Netscape.
But a funny thing happened. Posting to Digg did get more traffic to my site, even if I didn’t get too many ‘diggs.’ Diggs seem to be reserved for people who are hyper active on the Digg homepage, not people like me that just write stuff and submit it. Like everything else on the net, it seems to be a give and get kind of thing on the diggs. though I do have a couple of posts we five or six diggs, that is about as high it goes for me. But people are coming. . .
Like a number of bloggers, I have found Google Trends to be a way cool thing. Except that by the time I have written a post on a volcanic topic, it has dropped down to mild again. My one exception is a post I wrote on Micheal Vick, in which I misspelled Michael. This Micheal Vick post got over two hundred hits and currently has 60 comments. For me that is a big wow.
So following standard advice has gotten me around a hundred hits a day. I know, still tiny potatoes, but I have only been really hard at it for a couple of months. In a year or two, I fully expect two or three hundred readers. I can hope for a thousand or two, well, I can hope for more than that.
SEO for me has been adding my url to search engines, adding a metatag to my html, posting to as many of the social networks as I can, mainly Digg as I found this way cool little Digg button code. Thanks! Reddit has a few of my posts and I have already seen a few hits coming in, though I have not been there all that long. My hits from Digg are in the hundreds. I have been listed first once or twice on Google and often show up on the first page. This is way cool. I have even had posts listed under blogs on the Google Trends page, which is a hoot.
So what am I doing with all this traffic? Not much. I have put up some Google Adsense ads and made a whooping one dollar so far. But hey, a buck’s a buck, right?
Check out my Squidoo Lens on Trend Blogging. Or my Hubpage on Adsense and Buzz.
So, I am trying to write relevant, topical, quality posts. Digg seems to like me. Reddit seems to like me. Google Trends seems to like me. All I need to do now is get out there and get some good links and leave a few comments on good blogs. Search Engine Optimization, it’s not just a job, it’s something that takes up all your time.
Hmm, I wonder what’s on TV?
