One misconception about SEO is that if you get first page rankings on a search engine you are guaranteed high traffic volume. That idea is false! It is completely and utterly false.
It does not matter if you have good rankings — what matters is your content. Period. No ifs, ands, or buts. Now, of course if you get #1 rankings for a great keyword like “computer” you are going to get extremely high amounts of traffic, but lots of visitors does not mean lots of sales.
If you were to get the crappiest website on the planet #1 placement on Google you will receive lots of traffic, and maybe some sales or ad click-throughs (if you use Adsense), but you will not get nearly as much money as you could get if you had a decent (at least 40 page) niche site or blog.
The quantity of visitors does not matter — what really matters is the quality of your visitors and your ability to turn them into customers.
The secret to getting return visits strongly depends on your target market, but the general rule of thumb is: have good content. Whenever you start a site you should try to create at least one page every day for at least a month for a total of at least 30 pages. My reasoning behind this is that both humans and search bots are a lot alike, they both hate sites with little content and they both love sites with lots of content; especially if the site is targeted toward a specific niche.
So to wrap up what I just said, just because you may have the #1 site on Google that doesn’t mean you will make lots of money through sales or ad revenue. The opposite is true as well. You could have a 1,000 page site with tons of valuable content but if you have low search rankings your site will get no traffic.
To succeed on the web you either have to become a jack-of-all-trades and do everything perfectly, or you have to manage your time and do a little bit of SEO and a little bit of writing every day for a while. Either way is better than completely missing half of the equation.
There are some sites that somehow or another get 800,000 page views a month but they are paid “only” $4,500 a month. There are other sites that have the same number of views but they make five times as much. The quality of your visitors makes all the difference. Some come and go while others stay a while. Although you can’t directly control their behavior you can control their interest in your site.
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November 29th, 2006 at 8:04 am
Is there any special techniques that can be used to optimize a wordpress blog on my server for SEO. One issue I see is no way to change the title tags on each page, where it seems to take the blog name for the home page.
I have several hundred 600+ inbound links.
I have pinged Technorati manually and used pingoat as well as pingomatic every time I add a new blog.
There is plenty of content, about 30 articles.
What else can I do? What else should I do to optimize my blog?
December 4th, 2006 at 5:22 pm
Sorry about the late reply, my main computer is busted, so it is a bit hectic around here.
You can change the title tag by editing your template. The information for the title is generally stored in the header.php file in your template’s directory. Here is a link to the WordPress tag page.
You can do all sorts of nifty stuff like display your blog’s description just on the home page. I’m thinking of writing a quick tutorial on how to do that, when I get my computer back from the repair place I will get started on it.
As for other SEO techniques if you don’t have it already, I would highly recommend getting the WordPress Sitemaps Plugin. It is an absolute must-have.
It sounds like your blog is already doing pretty well, especially with 600 inbound links.
However, there is a point where you just can’t optimize anymore, at that point you have to start relying on word-to-mouth advertising more. You can help that along by adding “email this” links and getting in discussions with your readers. It also doesn’t hurt to comment on a bunch of other blogs. One thing I have found is that if I point out an error in an article people are more likely to click on my link.
Really just put your URL wherever you can. On email signatures, forum signatures, business cards, footers of your articles, etc.
Sadly there really isn’t a single way to get lots of traffic, what may work for one person may not work for another.
Thanks for your comment, and thanks for reading.