The Great SEO Experiment Begins!

The Great SEO Experiment Begins!

So, here we are on stage one of improving the SEO of my website Increase Your Traffic. Where to begin you may ask? Well, this blog is actually stage one!

I decided to have a separate blog describing my SEO journey for several reasons. Firstly, I wanted to see if I could get some links coming into the article directory from somewhere new and that I had control over. In order to do this, I decided to start a new blog hosted with a new company in order to have the links coming from a new IP address. As the blog is new, it starts out with zero links itself, and a page ranking of zero. So, in a way, I also need to get the value of this site increased as well!! What a complicated process.

In order to see exactly how things are measured and indexed, I am not going to do anything for a week. I will not create a link to this blog site from anywhere, nor link to it from Facebook or Twitter. For the first week, lets see what happens……

Actions – This website has several links leading to the home page of my blog.

Expected Results – I do not expect these links to be added , nor in fact this blog to even get indexed by Google or the other search engines.

Starting the SEO Journey

Starting the journey

So, as I begin the Great SEO Experiment, its important to know the place from which I am starting. Only by doing this, can I know if things have improved or not. As I said, the site has been live sometime, and so it already has some search engine juice behind it. Below, are the links into my site, as seen in the Google Webmaster Tools.

31 sites link to mine

Now, admittedly that is not a lot of sites! It gives me a current page rank of 2 though, as checked on this website http://www.prchecker.info/

So, they are the links coming in, but what are the most linked pages?

I have only one linked page. This is the home page at http://www.increaseyourtraffic.co.uk. It has 1843 links, and these come from 32 sites. Why 32 sites, when the other information said only 31 sites linked in? Looking again, the previous info said Top 31 sites of 32. No idea why!

　

Conclusion – Looking at the links as they are, it is pretty clear that I need to increase the number of them, and if possible, get some links to inner pages.

The next section is what search terms people have used to find the site -

Now, the first thing that stands out is that not a lot of people have reached the site through a search engine!

Conclusion – get it ranking higher in the search engines, especially for search terms such as article directory, article directories etc.

Note – Why is the traffic so low? Well, I get a lot of direct traffic, and a lot of traffic from one website. According to my Google Analytics, this is where the traffic came from during the period Jan 21 2011 and Feb 21 2011-

(Apologies if that hasn’t come up clearly, I am still getting used to all this!)

So, direct traffic and one website account for the bulk of my visitors. Obviously I am pleased with the amount of people visiting, but it could be more, and I need to improve my sources.

Conclusion – Gain more traffic sources, and gain more traffic!

So, there we have it…. That’s the level that I am starting at. On the 21^st of each month, I will print new statistics and have a compare with the last month, perhaps keeping a separate file even on Google docs for everyone to see.

　

　

The Great SEO Experiment

Welcome to the Great SEO Experiment! So, what is the experiment exactly, and just how great is it?

Well, put simply, this blog will follow my progress as I try to increase the SEO of my article directory. My article directory is called, ironically enough Increase Your Traffic!

Perhaps a little history of the website might be handy at this point. Firstly, it is not a new site. I have owned the domain name for about four years now. The site has gone through several different transformations, at first having links to free SEO tools around the web. This set up had two problems. Firstly, by definition people were leaving my site to use these free SEO tools… Not exactly a bright business plan! Secondly, there wasn’t that much traffic in the first place!

Different incarnations saw it idle, as a blog site and now finally an article directory. Its birth as an article directory was actually more of an accident than anything else, and so far has proven to be its best format. I at the moment get about a dozen new account sign ups a day, and 20 decent articles submitted.

Encouraged by this activity with quite minimal effort, I have decided to try and improve the numbers of visitors through purely SEO means. As such, this blog will act as a record of my progress, and the things that I discover along the way. It should be an interesting journey… Please bookmark me to keep an eye on my progress!

Dave