Search Engine Traffic question for Steve

[John Wesley]

I'm curious about how search engine traffic develops. I have been blogging for about 4 months, and in that time my SE traffic has climbed from nothing to around 100 visitors a day, almost entirely long tail keyword strings.

I have read posts about sites experiencing enormous increases in SE traffic once the sites reached the 9 mo. to a year age range. Is this how it worked for StevePavlina.com? Was there any point when search traffic really exploded or was it all gradual?

If anyone else has experience with this I'd love to hear about that too.

[Iksander]

Around 2003 I was running a very small static HTML web page - and I noticed the influx of visitors from the Search Engines increased dramatically with the more updates I did.

I am not as literate as I would like to be regarding Search Engine technology - but, I would venture a guess that as you steadily update your content, your ranking in the engines will be higher than those who do not.

It does make sense too on a specific time min - max setting they must have. It probably gives hobby projects that come up and go down less ranking than those who pass a specific time marker, displaying the intention of longevity?

Still would like to hear an answer from a more experienced programmer though.

[Elenny]

I'm sure there's a method to the madness, and Steve probably knows it, but it's a mystery to me.

About six months ago I went through the process of registering a domain, buying hosting, and installing a Wordpress blog for my sister.

She wrote 3 short posts and forgot about it, yet that blog seems to be ranking very high on Google.

From 2003 to 2005 I had a blog which I updated 3 or 4 times per week with long posts -- totalling over 500 posts in the 3 years -- but I never found it on Google.

So I think I will also benefit from the responses to this post.

[escapee]

I 'd suggest writing something that is controversial but motivating like Steve did with " 10 reasons you should never get a job ". Word of mouth is the best advertisement. I recall that i've forwarded this article to all of my friends ...

[Steve Pavlina]

Only about 5% of my traffic comes from search engines. It was never a major part of my traffic growth, so there were no major SE surges I noticed. Virtually all the growth came via word of mouth, especially from other bloggers blogging about this site. On average I see 10-20 bloggers add new links to this site every day, whether I post or not.

There's no one essential referrer for this site. New traffic mainly comes from thousands of individual referring sites as well as from face-to-face word of mouth. It adds up.

[John Wesley]

Thanks for the response, Steve. It's interesting to know that most traffic comes from random referrals. I would've thought that ranking so highly for terms like 'personal development' would bring in a higher percentage.

[Adam]

From what I understand, Google decided to put new domains into a 'sandbox' mode, where its rankings, and thus the weight it has on other people's rankings, wouldn't get too high within the first nine months. This was a move to counter 'link islands,' or sites that were created for the purpose of linking to another site and raising its Google rankings. Most other search engines that put weight on the number and value of links have also followed suit.

I've heard rumors that the time in the sandbox has been reduced to six months, but I have no way to confirm it, as I have only had my current domain since late January. If my search traffic increases dramatically in late June, we'll know... Three more months to go, or maybe six more...

[escapee]

If you would use wordtracker.com to search for keyword popularity of "personal development". It almost feels like a SEO disaster.

No. Keyword (for MSN only )
Why quotes? KEI Analysis (?) Count (?) 24Hrs (?) Competing (?)
1 "self improvement" 0.009 117 19 1596583
2 "personal development" 0.005 132 21 3195242
3 "personal growth" 0.004 91 14 2201099

[Jill]

escapee, you're looking at the wrong stats in Wordtracker. You don't want to do that KEI thing as it is a useless measurement that doesn't tell you anything. Your best bet is to simply look at the predicted number of searches per day, and the relative position in the list of the phrases that are relevant to your site.

As to the "sandbox," yes, there is such a thing. We call it the "aging delay" at my forum. It won't affect you for very uncompetitive phrases, but for the most part you won't be able to rank for anything even remotely competitive with Google for 9-12 months. It is possible that it has been reduced to 6 months now, I don't do much with new domains to be sure. My SEMNE site is around 6 months old, however, and has recently started to rank for some semi-competitive phrases, so this could be true.

You do have to gain high quality links, however, to get out of that sandbox and lessen your aging delay. Without those, it will take much longer. High quality links are those from true authority sites, not things like directory listings, forum signatures, and the like which you can basically add for yourself. High quality links are those that are TRUE votes in favor of your site from people/sites who matter in your particular community.

Hope this helps!

[added]

Originally Posted by Steve

Only about 5% of my traffic comes from search engines.

Which is exactly as it should be. Search engine traffic should alwayas be the "gravy" for your site. You should never rely on it to be the thing that puts food on your table as it's extremely volatile, and basically out of your hands. If/when you do start to receive more search engine traffic, don't allow that to make you lazy. Always have a number of forms of marketing and advertising up your sleeve at any given time.

[escapee]

I was in no way suggesting that everyone should look at KEI only .

BTW, The KEI = (predicted search/total competing sites) x 100. It does tell us something about the "supply and demand".

[Jill]

BTW, The KEI = (predicted search/total competing sites) x 100. It does tell us something about the "supply and demand".

No it really doesn't. That's what I'm trying to tell you.

It's very, very, very useless.

There are other ways of measuring what KEI tries (but fails) to do, however.

[escapee]

Oh, there's a long discussion on your forum related to KEI. Interesting .

Measuring Keyword Competition - High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum

http://www.seoresearchlabs.com/errata/quicktips.pdf

[Jill]

Yep! Dan Thies is our resident keyword research expert and he has some awesome info in that thread, and the keyword research forum in general.