There’s plenty of things I have not yet experimented with that could bring this website on to a lot more computer screens. For my stop and start posting style, I think I’m extremely lucky to have the amount of traffic I’m getting so far. While it could have been a lot better by now, it could have been much worse too.
As I’ve probably mentioned before, I got lucky in ranking high with a couple of popular keyword phrases for software that have kept this site on some people’s radar. You can probably figure out which ones those are by peeking over at most popular posts in the right sidebar. What seems to bring the most traffic to the site is posting consistently. As soon as I start posting every few days at a minimum, I see a momentum swing upward almost immediately.
My process for creating a post is pretty decent too. I start with visiting the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find keywords with a lot of global searches but with low to medium competition. I figure if less people are spending money to advertise for a certain keyword or phrase, I might have a better chance at a higher ranking.
Once I find a good number of keywords that fall into that category, I’ll then play with a few different headline ideas for my title and search for them as well. I want to see what other sites might be using similar (or exact) titles, and if I find the whole front page of Google is filled with titles too similar, I start again or at least alter it a bit.
I’m using the Thesis theme so it has a custom title field as well as a place for meta description and meta keywords. I select a second keyword rich title from my list of possibles for the custom title. Next I give it a post thumbnail url and choose a featured image for the teaser display. I save a draft and then begin writing the post.
The only other thing I do is to try and include an internal link or two if possible. I don’t try to push it, but if it’s a natural mention of another product or idea I’ve written about previously, I’ll link to it. I also like to occasionally link to Wikipedia pages if I mention something odd or if I suspect people might not understand what I’m talking about.
That’s about it for my post process. There’s certainly room for improvement, but it’s worked for me so far. I think my next step will be exploiting the possibility of sharing, whether it’s a little social bookmarking, submitting the occasional post to Digg or StumbleUpon, and working on figuring the whole Facebook page thing out.
You’ll all show up if I can eventually figure it out, right? 😉
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