How to Use Google Hot Trends to Multiply Blog Traffic 600X In One Day
I have a somewhat dead personal blog that I’m lazy about updating and haven’t spent much time on. I’m not a coding expert, and the front page has about 120 errors right now. When I do write, I don’t often take the time to link to other sites. Often I just splash out some text, throw in a few tags, and put it out there. Thus, only a couple of old articles that I actually worked on get hits, and that usually only adds up to about 5-20 per day. Pretty lame.
On 10/22, my blog got exactly one hit. Over late last night and today, it has received around 600 hits, which accounts for about 40% of the hits my poor little blog has ever received. About 60% of these hits were traffic from links on other sites, and 40% were from search engines. These were quality, non-spammy hits. How did it happen?
- I found a very hot story and worked quickly to put up good content. This story was riding at the top of Google Hot Trends all day. I linked to other sites reporting on it and immediately used the Wordpress All-In-One SEO Pack to optimize for hot keywords and those close to it. I made sure the keywords I optimized for were present in the text of my story, even going back afterwards to cheat a little bit and put them in there.
- My meta title tag featured the most important keywords I wanted to optimize for. The biggest hits I got from search engines were from keywords used in the meta title tag. I’ll admit I wasn’t as ambitious SEO-wise with the title of my post as I was with the meta title, but I made sure the URL contained important keywords.
- Link out to reputable sources who will track back to you AND DO IT EARLY. I linked to a site that was getting tons of traffic yesterday and I did it fast, so on her trackbacks list, I was very high up on the list. I received upwards of 400 quality visitors from this trackback. Perhaps most importantly, my title took a different take on the story than others. It’s important to stand out when writing on a volcanic story, and make sure the title stands out.
- Make sure it’s in the social media realm. The value of getting somebody to bookmark your post on Facebook or Digg it on Digg cannot be underestimated. Digg especially carries a lot of Google juice and can make your site go atomic if it gets a lot of Diggs. It helps to make a lot friends on Digg so they will Digg up your stories automatically. For a blogger, having a strong Digg network is an easy way to get automatic hits no matter how crappy your posts are.
- Keep updating if your post as the story blossoms. Don’t rest on your laurels with a good, early post. Keep updating the story, keep linking to new sources, and develop a narrative that is unique. Once you get the reader in, you want them to stay there, and if all you’re offering is old news, then they are going to bounce off.
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