I’m currently researching the keywords I want to promote over the Christmas buying season, as my gadgets site is established and already does pretty well from the search engines my primary promotion method is going to be SEO. I’m not going to write about the products I’m promoting here (as that would be rather silly) but I will share the tools and process I use in my research.

As a working example I’m going to pretend that I’ll be promoting satellite navigation systems, which actually wouldn’t be a bad product to choose, they are a relatively high value and a potentially popular Christmas present. So first off is researching the most popular search term for these and looking to see if they have been popular for Chrimbo in the past.

Checking Trends
I always refer to my satelite navigation system as a sat nav as I expect most people do, but I want to market to a global audience so I’d like to check that. This is where Google Trends helps, it doesn’t give exact search figures but does let you compare the popularity between terms.

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I’ve mentioned before that I’m a fan of checklists and after seeing some of the comments or our recent site reviews I thought it would be a good idea to create an SEO checklist. If you have any suggestions on things that we should add to this list please let us know.

I like to break the process of SEO into 3 different parts:
On Page – This is what should be done on individual pages
On Site – These are things that can be done across your entire site to improve overall SEO
Off Page/Site – Influencing factors on other sites

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My last bout of traffic analysis resulted in two posts here (long tail searches and one on optimising Adsense positioning) and a bit of extra cash (which is always nice). It was also successful in two other ways, one of which should bring me a bit more traffic and the other a bit of extra income.

Remonetize Popular Content
Using Google Analytics it’s easy to see which of your pages are the most popular. I find you never really know which pages are going to become popular in the search engines but statistical analysis does sort of give you the benefit of hind sight. Once I see a page is bringing in a bit of traffic I’ll revisit it and see if there are any suitable affiliate programs I could promote. You know what people are searching for to find the page so if you can find them a suitable product everybody benefits.

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Ranking for a single keyword can be very lucrative (just ask Scott and his tattoos) but ranking for any semi-competitive keyword or phrase is both difficult (especially for new sites) and may not be the most profitable of rankings. Whilst doing a bit of stat research last week I found I was getting a bit of traffic for the term inflatable water slides, after checking on Google I saw my site was currently in the #2 spot but the year old page was getting twice as much traffic as that ranking was generating, time for a bit more research.

In the past two weeks the page has been found 1,435 for the term ‘inflatable waterslide’, however Google Analytics was reporting:

This page was viewed 2,794 times via 147 keywords

So it was getting nearly the same amount of traffic again from 146 different phrases. I won’t list all the phrases here as that would get somewhat repetitive however here’s a selection of the top and bottom. (more…)

No, the title of this blog post isn’t designed to be keyword stuffing, it describes probably the most important ranking factor and single thing every webmaster has had great trouble with, more so today than at any previous point in the history of the internet.

The history
Some of us started many years ago with sites that were not monetised and like any information portal like a tourist information office that had leaflets to related attractions, events and accommodation most websites freely linked out to other sites of interest or relevance. Logical capt’n.

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Just going to do a recap on how the reverse stumble played out over the last few weeks.

Initially the one page reverse stumble website had over 10,000 visitors in the immediate 2 day period, I’ll take a little look at the after effects of the stumble to see what gives in relation to backlinks and residual traffic over a month later.

As with many social websites when content is stumbled it can create a wave effect giving a few popular spikes as its gets stumbled and rediscovered and also as with most websites I own Tuesday is a peak day.

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When it comes to getting traffic to your blog (or most other sites to that matter), the most important thing you can get are plenty of inbound links. Inbound links will both send you traffic from the originating site and more importantly they serve as a vote for your site which will influence your site’s position in the search engines.

There are various ways to generate inbound links:

• Buy them – using services like Review Me or Text Link Ads or source direct in forums
• Exchange links – this is were you link to one site and in return they link to you. You can contact similiar themed and sized sites or again use a forum
• Organic links – these are when other sites link to you on their own accord and what this article is all about.

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Related somewhat to my earlier post on mini sites and also finding an old domain for a new venture it is always a great boost to get a domain name with some traffic, generic domain names often have type in traffic but cost good money, the other type of domain name with traffic is one with a history that has been used before, in this case even if it has expired you could register the domain and find it has traffic from links around the internet.

Just one of many resources that could help you find these type of domains would be a listing like such as: http://osx.hyperjeff.net/Apps/Graveyard.php A complete list of graveyard game application sites no longer in use, in there will be domains that are in use/have expired/have dead pages, many of which have good backlinks and some  traffic. A graveyard for some, rich pickings for other

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There are 1001 SEO blogs, tools and forums out here to learn from so I don’t think that I need to go into any great depth as to the basics, I personally learnt a lot through my own trial and error and reading Digital Point solidly for about a year, if there is one aspect of seo that I believe is worth concentrating on it is your indented listings.

An indented listing is where you get a normal organic listing but also a secondary indented listing below it to the same website.

How do you get an indented listing?

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We’ve not done all that much by way of promotion with Self Made Minds and are instead using a long term strategy of quality content will bring traffic over time. That being said we’ve still tried a few traffic generating ideas when the opportunity presented it self, so in this post I want to share them.

The first two promotion methods we tried cost a bit of cash, the others cost our time.

Press Release
We paid a pro to write us a press release about the site and distribute it via PR web. The total cost of this was around $200 and a bit of time was spent by Scott sending it manually to various related sites. Traffic on the day was up slightly and we picked up a couple of decent links including one from entrepreneur.com But I don’t think it created anything like the traffic we were hoping for. It’s a difficult one to get exact figures for but the link on entrepreneur.com did bring us 476 visitors.

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