May 20, 2009 – Roughly 5 weeks has elapsed since my small change in the title and I have to say that the results are definitely positive but a little on the inconclusive side. Rank position overall in my keywords has improved slightly but I did not really see any initial drop in visits. This could be because the change was so small as to be almost insignificant but seeing as results were positive I will call this one a success. Now I am thinking of taking this one step further and removing the term ‘all’ from the title to see if there is another bump in ranking as the title becomes a little more focused. The one thing that I want to stay aware of is that the title itself can have a major effect on click-thrus but I don’t anticipate the removal of the word ‘all’ having a negative effect. As an FYI here are the improvements between April 9th to today: up 4 spots to 12th for the term ‘strange news’ (I know making it to the front page for this one will have a great effect), up two spots for the term ‘weird news’ to number 17, up one spot to number 5 for ‘odd news’ (hitting number one or two for this term would be amazing) and a nice little surprise is that I finally hit the board for a nice term – ‘news of the weird’ I am in the 48th position but this could be a nice one in the long-term.
April 4, 2009 – I have decided to make a tiny change to see what the effect will be on my short-term (I am positive it will go down) and long-term (assuming it will go up) traffic by tweaking the home page title of the site. I took out the word ‘stuff’ from the title and rearranged the words so it would make more sense. the current title is ‘All Crazy Weird News – Odd stuff, strange news stories’ – My hypothesis is that if I remove the word ‘stuff’ which does not get me any traffic it would possibly help me move up for the rest of the keywords. So far I have noticed a large (50%) drop in traffic over the past couple of days but I have seen this before when page titles are changed. My hope is that I bounce back stronger and I should have a better idea in a couple of weeks.
On a side-note I no longer see site links for the site for that term but I am also ranking number one for ‘strange news stories’. I will have to try some alternative data centers to see if I have site links anywhere.
January 26, 2009 – Ok, so this is really the only site I have had time to put any work into because I currently have a full-time job working as an SEO analyst. But some really good news for this site!! I am now ranking number one for the term “crazy news stories” and not only that but site links are showing up for me.
Oct. 21. 2008 Good news – after a bit of a slow August, Sept. and Oct. are doing great and I am averaging more than 450 visits a day. I am also happy to say I moved into second spot (on most Google data centers) for the term “crazy news” and I am also pleased to see tons of search traffic for a wide variety of long-tail keyphrase – see image below and be sure to notice that ‘other’ accounts for over 25% of the total searches.
July 28, 2008 – I finally did it, I tweaked the title so the term ‘crazy’ is there now and I also took out the .com after ‘news’. It will be interesting to see how this effects my rankings.
June 1, 2008 – Last month was a real break-out for this site (www.AllWeirdNews.com), visits per day sky-rocketed to an average of 329 per day. One really positive development is that traffic through my RSS feed has increased to almost 2k for the month. I am also starting to notice traffic coming in through the categories which is a great sign and I will try and build some relevant links for those over the Summer. My work on the term ‘crazy news’ is paying off with 36.5% of my search traffic coming from that term and an additional 3.6% coming from the term ‘crazy news stories’. So far this case study has shown fantastic results and it would be really amazing to have two similar sites dominate the search results for different high traffic terms. One note is that my main keyword ‘crazy news’ is a lesser percentage of the total searches but the number of visitors is way up, that simply means I am getting a good mix of keyword traffic which is very important for the long-term stability of a website.
April 2008 – This past month saw another nice bump in traffic with the average visits going to 140 a day. I currently rank number 3 on the first page of results on Google for the phrase “Crazy News”, number one is the site CrazyNews.com and just below me is CrazyNews.net – I will embark on some more link building this month and see if I can grab that number 2 or 1 spot so I can compare the traffic results. My main keyword phrase ‘crazy news’ is at a healthy 49.9% and I am pleased to see that ‘other phrases’ accounts for 29.5% of total search engine traffic. What that means is that there is probably some ‘keyword gold’ in there and I should be able to leverage those in the future. A close look at ‘other phrases’ can reveal patterns of keywords that can make a huge difference in overall traffic. There are a lot of SEO’s that will tell you that the holy grail is first position for one of your industries top 3 keywords and they are right, but achieving that can be just like the search for the holy grail, long, frustrating and more often than not leading to failure. A website can be very successful by looking for quality search engine traffic in more unlikely (and less competitive) places.
March 2008 – Average daily visitors is over 100 now and my keyword phrase ‘crazy news’ accounted for 42% of my search engine traffic. Because of my expanded targeting of keywords the phrases “weird news stories” and “strange news stories” have moved into second and third place with 7.9% and 5.9% respectively. I am making a note of a couple more categories drawing some traffic, weird criminals and crazy people, those could be important on my 6 month SEO review.
Feb 2008 – Analyzing the statistics for February I saw a solid doubling of visits to an average of 60 per day and I also started to see some search hits entering on internal category pages like, ‘odd animals’ and off-beat stuff. I made a note of that so I could do some further research on those keywords and perhaps leverage those internal categories to bring in more traffic. A good SEO will always pay attention to an entire websites and not just the home page, that is one of the biggest mistakes that can be made. Search percentages for my two main keyword phrases held steady. My percent of search engine traffic was a tad below 25% and my keywords ‘crazy news’ (22.9) and ‘crazy news stories’ (4.2%). I decided to target a few other keyword phrases in this genre to try and improve overall traffic. I still wanted to concentrate on my new main keyword ‘crazy’ because I wanted to be able to compare my results to my other site www.VeryWeirdNews.com but I also want to use common sense and make this project a success.
Jan. 2008 – I have decided to launch a new blog with a similar topic to www.VeryWeirdNews.com, this one is called www.AllWeirdNews.com – My idea was to launch a similar site but to target a different set of keywords and see if I could duplicate my success. I used a similar posting pattern of basically one or two new posts per month and also built backlinks in a similar way using free and paid directory submissions, blog comments, blogroll links, content links and a very limited number of paid ads. I also submitted a few stories to various social bookmarking sites. By the end of the first month I was getting a small amount of traffic (averaging around 30 visits a day) and was getting search hits for my new keywords ‘crazy news’ (23.7) and ‘crazy news stories’ (9.4%).