Garaphernalia 7.5

Here is the break down of traffic to Everything-Everywhere.com from Jan. 1 to Mar. 23.

• Referring Sites – 67%
• Direct Traffic – 19%
• Search Engines – 14%

That is pretty interesting in and of itself. I have put more effort into link building than into anything else and it shows in where the traffic is coming from. What search engine efforts I have been making have been under the “Travel Blog” term. As you will see, that might be a waste of my time.

From 1/1 to 3/23 I have received 4,070 visits from search engines. Of the keywords used to find my site, three of the top for were variations of the domain name: “Everything-Everywhere”, “Everything Everywhere”, and “Everywhere Everything”. Those accounted for about 12% of all keywords. The remaining 88% were distributed over 2,681 keyword searches.

Here are the top 25 searches:

What are the lessons I should get from this?

1) Trying to focus on any keyword is a waste of time. The vast majority of searches came from thing I never planned on. There is no way anyone could or would focus on those keywords.

2) My bigger posts tend to do better, but not that much better. My Seven Wonders of the Philippines post did well among keywords, but not so well as make a big difference. As they are content most likely to get linked and get traffic from search engines, those are the type I should focus on.

3) Don’t worry about search engines. At only 14% of all my incoming traffic, it isn’t much to begin with, and with that spread out so far, it is hard to focus on anything. If I wanted more search engine traffic, I’m not even sure how or what I’d focus on. My best strategy is just to focus on link building and try to write good content. Let the search engines take care of itself.

Lets suppose you are someone with no friends. You are a recluse who never goes outside. If you were to die inside your home, your corpse would rot until collection agencies came to get your electric bill. Literally, no one knows you are alive.

Now all of a sudden, you win the lottery. You want to get some friends. You buy some nice clothes, a nice car, and start going to clubs buying drinks for everyone. Suddenly, everyone wants to hang out with you. It is costs you $10,000 a night, but you finally have friends. Lets also say that every night you go out and buy drinks, 200 people are willing to hang out with you.

Now, lets assume the money runs out. 190 of those 200 people never even bothered to remember your name. They want nothing to do with you now. There are however 10 people who sill want to hang out with you even though you aren’t spending money on them.

How many friends did you really have at the peak of your popularity? The obvious answer is 10. The other 190 weren’t really friends, even though they may have provided the illusion of friendship.

This is pretty much how you can look at most of the traffic from Entrecard.

During my stay in Melbourne, I was dropping between 150 to 300 cards a day. The price for my travel site (Everything-Everywhere.com) got as high as 300, which means I had 150 people from Entrecard visiting my site to drop cards. I’d say on average it was around 260. In the week since I’ve left Melbourne, I’ve dropped zero a day because I don’t have regular Internet access. My price has dropped to around 120, which it was before I started dropping again.

I went from 130 people visiting my site on a daily basis to 60. That means that 70 of those people were only visiting because I was dropping cards on them. They weren’t coming for content or because of what I was doing. They weren’t real traffic, they were the illusion of traffic. The illusion of traffic shows up the same on your log file, but they will only show up if you jump through hoops for them.

If you are a brand new site and have zero traffic, jumping through hoops to build up some traffic might be worth it. Even if you get a bunch of illusionary traffic, you will probably pick up some readers in the process. The question however is how long is it worth the time and effort to keep people coming to your site who otherwise would not visit?

Many Entrecard users have developed a Paris Hilton syndrome where having hangers-on and the size of your entourage are considered a sign of status….even if they will leave you at the drop of a hat the moment the money stops flowing.

Entrecard is not free. Time is the most valuable resource and the time you spend day after day after day dropping on the same sites just to inflate your numbers is time you are not spending on creating new content or trying to promote your site to new readers. Moreover, the more real readers your site had, the more meaningless the 300 (maximum) fake visitors every day will become. A site with 3,000 readers would be crazy to spend a hour every day to increase traffic by 10%, especially when the 10% doesn’t care what you are doing. A site with 30,000 readers would be certifiably insane.

I still keep Entrecard’s widget on my site, but I don’t organize my life around it. There is nothing wrong with the system, you just have to keep in mind who your real friends are.

I have achieved my goal of getting to page 2 of Google for the term “travel blog”. Here is how I did it:

• First, I read up on search engine optimization. I had no clue what Google looked for and so this was really a necessary step. Your rank depends on two things: the content of your site and incoming links.
• I got a Pro account on SEOmoz.org and used their tools to analyze my site. I was able to run reports for which sites are ranked highest, where I rank, how the content of my page performs, etc. This was invaluable.
• I made subtle changes to the page. You might have noticed that I changed the title of the site from “Everything Everywhere” to “Everything Everywhere Travel Blog”. Not only is a bit more descriptive for people to stumble the site, but it also helps having the keyword you want in the title. Moreover, most of the people who linked to me will link the term “Everything Everywhere Travel Blog” which helps dramatically in determine where you show up. A very small change, but important.
• If you look at the site, you will notice a few other small changes. Under the RSS button, I changed “Subscribe to my RSS feed” to “Subscribe to my Travel Blog’s RSS feed”. Under the Bloggers Choice Award button I changed “vote for me” to “Click to vote for Best Travel Blog”. I put that in strong tags. I added a copyright notice at the bottom and used the H3 tag. Google looks to see how the term is used. By liberally putting the term on the page in different tags (headers, bold, links), it will add to the score of the page.
• I moved my blogroll to a separate page. This did several things. 1) I can liberally add many sites if I want to do link exchanges without bogging down every other page. 2) By limiting outbound links on every page, I can better preserve my page rank. 3) If I get page rank nuked for having lots of links, I am isolating it to a single page, not the rest of my site. 4) I am creating a page with the term “Travel Blog” in the URL.
• I did a search on SEOmoz on the top 200 sites ranked under “Travel Blog”. Many of them were directories. I submitted my blog to those directories and put the tiny button at the bottom of my site. That gives me links incoming. I also added rel=”nofollow” to all the outgoing directory links so I don’t get hurt on Page Rank. They still get links and the image, but it doesn’t hurt Page Rank. I also get a small trickle of traffic from the directories. Only put nofollow on the directory links and will link liberally when needed in normal posts.
• If you scroll down, you’ll see I had a day where I posted like 400 links to websites. I did it on this site, even though the link I added was for my other site. That has probably given me over 400 inbound links, all with the term “Travel Blog”. My Technorati rank went from 70,000 to almost 20,000. I totally stumbled into that link list, but it worked and I didn’t have to worry about the Page Rank backlash by putting it on my main site.
• Most of this was one time work. It shouldn’t require a ton of attention now that it is up and running. To rank higher I need quality links, not quantity. That will come from content, not gimmicks. I will probably never rank #1 because there are sites which have “TraveBlog” in the domain name. Most of the first page are either sites that host travel blogs, or the blogs from the travel editors of big newspapers. Also, the age of a site is a factor, and my site isn’t that old.
• I may do something similar for when I launch the podcast. Getting on page one for “travel podcast” should be much easier. Only 4 of the items on the front page are actual podcasts. I will have to make sure and label it the “Everything Everywhere Travel Podcast”.

The whole SEO process was very educational. I am confident I could do this for other sites now. There are some subtle things I have yet to learn, but overall, it isn’t rocket science.

I’m making good progress on my Q1 goals:

1) My RSS subscribers is now up to 280 as of today. I’m still looking to hit 350 by the end of March. I hope the podcast will help in that department. If I count podcast subscribers from iTunes (and there is no reason why not), I’m guessing I might be able to hit it.

2) I’m on page 3 for Google for the search term “travel blog”. My goal was page 2.

3) My Technorati Authority is now over 200 and I’m in the top 30,000. I also have 66 Technocrati fans. (if I really pushed this, I could get in the Technorati Top 100. #100 is only like 240). Again, this is pretty much meaningless to me now. After pouring over my stats, I’m going to just focus on quality links.

4) Major mentions. So far, nothing.

5) 1,000 visitors per day. It is hard to do this and have lots of RSS at the same time. I think I might hit 500 on an regular basis by the end of the month.

6) 2 of the 3 site improvements are done. The third and big one should be up in 2 weeks.

I’ve spent a lot of my time in Melbourne working on things like search engine optimization for the site, building a site map for search engines, etc. It is mostly work which is only necessary to do once. Once I’m out of Melbourne, I don’t think I’ll have a lot of time to work on that and I’d rather focus on actually doing content, which has been rather light this month.

I’ve also begun to lay the groundwork for eventually adding ads to the site. I’m not going to do that for a while. I think it is silly to put ads on your site if you don’t have sufficient traffic (and I do not). The earliest I can see doing that is in 3 months. I’m very concerned about contextual focus of the ads. I’m going to really go out of my way to make sure everything is targeted to travel and not to “punch the monkey”. I want things to look like they belong there. So much of what makes web ads annoying are the fact they have nothing to do with what the focus of the site is. I’m going to line up affiliate programs with various hotel and airline companies, as well as sites like National Geographic and Lonely Planet.

I’ve been helping my friend Scott with advertising. He has a very popular site and runs a lot of Google ads. They really aren’t as great of a deal as they used to be and that seems to be the consensus everywhere I go.

The Where On Google Earth site is gaining some traction, but slowly. Its fun so I don’t worry too much about it.

• Technorati Rank: I crushed this goal. I was aiming for the top 60,000. I’m currently in the top 30,000. I don’t really care about this metric anymore. After going over my Google Analytics data, I’m really focusing more on quality than quantity.
• Top Site Mention: I was hoping for 3 mentions. I have zero. A month left to go and most of Feb. I’ve sat on my ass in Melbourne.
• RSS Subscribers: I’m shooting for 350 and i’m at 262. It is possible, but it will be close.
• Traffic: wanted 1,000 visitors a day. I’ll probably end up with 600-700. I can easily get 1,000 with traffic spikes, but not on a consistent basis. Oddly enough, my RSS numbers are increasing faster than my regular traffic. I think that is a good thing. It means my site is pretty sticky.
• Podcasting: This should be off the ground soon.

A lot will depend on how I execute in the next month. I’m developing a better feel from sifting through the data for what people link to and read. I haven’t done a ton of that sort of stuff this month. I think the podcast will help traffic.