Philoking.com

I decided to start putting more time into my blog again. I updated my theme to something more pleasing for readers, I started working on new content, and then I decided to take a look at where I stand on traffic. It’s amazing to me that I had gone two months without writing something. I assumed I was left for dead, yet here I am with nearly 300 average visitors per day, 11,000+ page views in the last 30 days.

It was a lot of working building my blog up in the beginnings. It’s a testament to the work that you put in that after you get the love from the search engines, they don’t really forget you. Sure my statistics are terrible. 93.45% new visitors? That’s all search engine traffic. 25 seconds per average visit? That means they are finding the content, reading and leaving. Looks like I need to invest in some more relevant content. 89% bounce rate? Obviously I don’t present interesting content in a way compelling enough to get them to click through.

So I’ll start with adding some great new content. I’ll work on my layout a little bit to make sure that my best foot is forward so to speak. Then I’ll get back into a building mode. This blog used to get over 30,000 unique visitors a month. I can get back there, I just have to put in the work.

hopefully you have already read about what trends you should be following and how to write to capitalize on those trends. This last piece could possibly be the most important. It’s time we look at how to make your readers "Read Deep."

What is Reading Deep?
When your users are coming to you by way of a search engine you have one major battle to fight. The reader is usually a bit short on attention span. When your reader comes to your page, you hope they find the article compelling, but wether they do or not, you want to have a serious impact on where they go next.

My users hang around for an average of 45 seconds and view 1.27 pages and leave. Those are the averages. The scary stat is that over 8 out of 10 readers do NOT view another page before they go. 83.87% leave before they view a second page.

Beyond writing good content covered previously, one often overlooked technique is making sure your readers have somewhere to go.

The image to the left shows in green the spots on my page that would lead a reader to more content on my site.

This particular page is the initial landing page or also the top of a single page article.

That’s a pretty good list of single word links that don’t really compel a user to click them unless he or she is really hot on a particular keyword.

Let’s look at the bottom of the article. (Of course we are hoping the reader makes it that far!!)

Now we are getting some useful links. The links you see now are relevant and detailed. They are interesting to the current reader and have serious value.

If your content has caught your reader’s attention enough for them to make it this far, there is a high likelyhood that you have built some credibility with the reader and they will glance at other related topics to find more information.

Having a related topics plugin like the one I use for WordPress is invaluable for this purpose. This might be an interesting place to use some zoning in Google Analytics to see how often your related articles sections are being used as well.

Tracking Progress
As with any other metric, averages are very hard to discern over long periods. The more numbers, the less visible the impact. One very valuable way to track these metrics is to change your default layout in Google Analytics or whatever tracking tool you use to track smaller periods of time and compare them to history.

The view above is the one that I follow daily. I have this report set up and have it emailed to me every day. It’s the best way I have found to get a glance at how my site is performing. Unfortunately this screenshot shows I am under performing to last week, but that’s the breaks of blogging. I guess it’s do as I say, not as I do!

I hope this has given a good insight into what you need to grow. Being a blogger is a task you have to be dedicated to and diligent about. Being a significant blogger is even more demanding. The principles I have laid out for you are going to help you grow. You will find that not implementing these regularly and consistently will lead to a traffic plateau. I am currently at that Plateau, while my traffic is growing, it’s relatively stable.

I will be implementing some of my ideas here as I have more time to spend with my site again (starting a new job in a demanding field is tough!) and I will document my progress so please subscribe and watch these tips take effect.

Now that you know what to write by following the trends, let’s talk about how to write. I don’t mean where to sit, what software to use, etc.. This is about how to research, how to pick your topic and how to make sure the search engines see it.

Making Your Topic Unique
Once you have your topic in mind, ask yourself if it’s a unique and valuable topic. The best things to write about are not your opinions (unless you are John C. Dvorak, lol) but How things work, productivity helpers, tutorials and reviews.

Your best readers are going to be someone who needs to know how to do something or someone who is interested in something that you can provide valuable insight about.

Problogger.net says "For a blog to be successful, your content needs to be useful and unique to your readers."

Running a blog is in many ways just like a business. If your writing is your product, and your product sucks, nobody is going to buy it and you will go out of business.  The old mantra in business is "Start with the customer – find out what they want and give it to them." It’s simple, but it’s totally accurate.

We have already used the previous article to decide what content is popular, so let’s move on to making sure it’s unique and valuable.

Stand Out
The first place to start is by doing some research. We have already looked at where we are showing up in the search results. Look at some of those same keywords, check out the other blogs and websites that are popular, and unless you think you can make a significant improvement or addition to the topic, go ahead and write it down on a notepad and cross it out.

Philoking’s Tip: Even if you write with a computer, keep a notepad in front of you to jot down ideas and thoughts. You might want to come back to them later.

Organizing Your Article
When I write, I begin by getting my thoughts out, taking little notice of it’s organization. Once I have my main bits sorted, I start to settle how it’s going to be most useful to read. I like to keep two sets of readers in mind and make sure the article is going to benefit both:

• Skimmers: These readers are rushed to find information on a topic and they don’t want to have to dig for it.
• Researchers: These readers want depth. They don’t want your long winded version of some PR company’s press blurb.

Skimmers are looking for a specific piece of information. I would bet that the majority of my readers on the World of Warcraft topics are skimmers. They just upgraded to Windows Vista, they installed World of Warcraft and it’s running like crap. All they want to know is what they can do to make it run better. Odds are they are not going to read a long winded article in it’s entirety, they just want the facts.

Researchers want depth. I would guess that the majority of my readers on the iPod Touch topics are Researchers. They are people who have either just got an iPod Touch and want to know what they can do with it, or someone who is considering purchasing an iPod Touch and want to find out all they can before they take the plunge.

Philoking’s Tip: Segment your article with Titles and make sure they allow easy, organized navigation of your topics.

Research, Research, Research!
With both sets of readers we are looking at, they want the truth. They want lots of detail and they want it to be accurate.

Taking your topic and separating it into organized chunks will help your readers but it will also help you break your research down into bite sized pieces.

Be sure to help your readers by citing any sources you use with hyperlinks so they can easily drill into more detail by following your research steps yourself. This will also build credibility with the community by showing respect to other writers.

Philoking’s Tip: Create a folder in your bookmarks and mark anything interesting you find on the web related to the article you are trying to write.

Never Forget SEO
Search engines are how they got here, let’s keep that train rolling by making sure this awesome article gets fair treatment in the search engine world.

• Place your keyword in your post’s title.
• Make sure your post slug has the keyword in it.
• Make sure your blog is using friendly URLs.
• Use your keyword in your very first sentence.
• Bold or Italicize the keyword for the benefit of search engines and your readers.
• Don’t overuse your keywords, bots consider this a factor in rating what is spam.
• Use your keyword a few times in the first paragraph.
• End strong by making sure your keyword is in the end of your last paragraph as well.
• Use Tags, always and use them properly.
• Use your keyword when hyperlinking to other sources.
• keyword tag your images.

These are just a few tips to help write great articles. There are many more. Check the following great websites for more information on writing great articles:

• Problogger.net
• Copyblogger.com
• bloggingtips.com

Continue to part 3, making your readers "read deep."

I have been mulling around this blog topic for awhile, trying to find a way to approach it that was unique and useful. We all follow our blogs closely, but as with anything, it’s what you do with that information that matters. In this article I will break down what trends you should be following, how to capitalize on those trends, and how to make your readers "read deep."

Finding Your Readers
In the world of blogging, the search engine is king. This week 83% of my traffic came from search engines:

Ouch, that’s pretty staggering. Clearly (and no offense to my employer…) Google is where it’s at in Organic Search. So next, let’s analyze my top 10 keyword searches and see how I am fairing in the indexing for those keywords:

* Indicates Page and Rank  (2/3 means page 2, 3rd result) of Search Result

That’s a lot of tabular crap for the beginning of a blog post, so what does it mean? Well, for starters it means I SHOULD be writing a hell of a lot more about iPod Touches and World of Warcraft on Windows Vista! Unfortunately, that’s not exactly how I run my blog, but for a blog in growth mode, with a more finite topic, the advice I am about to give can grow you from a handful of visitors to tens of thousands in a very short time.

It’s all fine and good to try and make your site rank high in specific places, but do not overlook where it is already getting indexed highly, and capitalize on that. The overall page rank of your site will grow and it will have a direct impact on how highly you rank on completely unrelated topics later.

So 94% of my traffic is coming from Google, and the iPod Touch accounts for 78% of my top 10 keywords searched. I am sure if you searched down through the complete results, you might find that many other keyword combinations outside the top 10 are seeking the same results, let’s snapshot just today:

Google Search: free games for the apple I touch
Google Search: buy iPod touch games
Google Search: iPod touch games
Google Search: tips for iPod touch
Google Search: iPod touch games
Google Search: iPod touch games
Google Search: iPod touch games
Google Search: iPod touch WiFi tricks
Google Search: iPod touch tricks
Google Search: iPod touch wil not browse Internet
Google Search: iPod touch tips
Google Search: iPod touch games
Google Search: iPod touch tricks
Google Search: iPod touch games
Yahoo Search: apple touch tips|
Google Search: iPod touch games
Google Search: games for iPod touch|
Google Search: iPod touch games
Google Search: iPod touch tricks
Google Search: iPod touch demo
Google Search: iPod touch+ tips
Google Search: iPod touch games
Google Search: iPod touch games how
Google Search: iPod touch games
Google Search: iPod touch games
Google Search: iPod touch jailbreaking application
Google Search: iPod touch games
Google Search: iPod touch tips
Google Search: my iPod touch doesn’t work on my windows XP
Google Search: iPod touch tips
Google Search: iPod touch tips
Google Search: how do you put DVDs on your iPod touch
Google Search: iPod touch tips
Google Search: iPod touch tricks
Google Search: mac OS x unstable
Google Search: iPod touch tricks
Google Search: free things to download onto your iPod
Google Search: iPod touch games
Google Search: iPod touch games
Google Search: iPod touch tips
Google Search: how to buy iPod touch games
Google Search: iPod touch demo
Google Search: iPod touch trick
Google Search: iPod touch trick for free
Google Search: iPod touch games
MSN Search: I touch apps
Google Search: iPod touch games
Google Search: iPod touch tips
Google Search: iPod touch games
Google Search: iPod touch download games
Google Search: iPod touch games
Google Search: iPod touch games offline
Google Search: games for iPod touch
Google Search: iPod touch tips

Geeze, all in all, that’s 69 times a user was led to my site through a search engine. Think of all the results I showed up in that didn’t click through (See writing great titles and writing SEO friendly blog posts!)

So clearly my blog is hot when it comes to iPod Touch! So if I were the type of guy that was trying to be a big time pro blogger, make wads off Adsense and dominate the world (of blogging) what would I do?

Riding The Trends
Obviously at this point I would try to find a specific iPod Touch related topic and get to work writing a insightful piece about it. The important thing is that you get to writing the right way. The worse thing you can do right now is throw out a quick and nearly useless article about the iPod Touch and become a poster boy for bounce rate. This is the most important advice I can give you about any blog post you write…

If it’s not valuable content, you have already lost your reader…

Think about it, we are all guilty of it, but seriously… my bounce rate is 83.87%! That means that less than two of every ten readers look at another article on my website before leaving. There are two main reasons that would cause this:

1. Not enough compelling content within visibility to make the reader continue to browse my site.
2. Much more likely, the article is not deep enough or valuable enough to engage the reader and make him or her consider me as an authority on the topic.

#2 is your key. Your article has to provide value, and more specifically provide value within the first few paragraphs. I would guarantee if I were a professional in the field of analytics (and I just happen to be) that you could draw a direct correlation between bounce rate and RSS subscriptions. The same users that are leaving your site after reading a few paragraphs are the same readers that are not subscribing because they don’t consider your website valuable enough.

Continue to Part 2 to get the skinny on how to write articles that are search engine friendly, on topic and make your readers bookmark and subscribe in droves…

Search engine algorithms are top secret. I would be willing to bet that only a very select few really understand how they work within their own companies. I have been fighting the good fight and have had incredible results with search engine optimization on Philoking.com, but only recently have I discovered a serious flaw in my personal branding, and it has brought to light some inconsistencies in the algorithms that provide results.

I could be way off base here, but at least in my opinion, Google, Yahoo and Live Search are the three most popular search engines. Recently I have began monitoring vanity searches on those services with the terms “Philoking” and “Jason Burns.”

Now this site is no gangbuster of traffic, sure I get tens of thousands of unique visitors a month and my Google Page Rank is 4 and growing, but it’s no monster site, that’s for sure. Never the less, I would hope that many cases would find it higher in relevant search results and especially in the case of Yahoo and Live, they do not.

I will disclose that I spend the majority of my time tailoring to Google, but I do submit sitemaps to the other two and would expect similar results. If you go to the top three and search “Philoking,” I am in the following places:

	Google	Yahoo	Live!
Rank	1	1	3

No big surprises here, on Live! I am bested by my own Flickr profile twice on Live! before my domain which matches the keyword 100% ironically, makes the cut.

My name is completely different though, look at these results.

	Google	Yahoo	Live!
Rank	3	12	7
Top Result	bbbburns.com	Myspace	Hoya burns

So recently I ran a question on Linkedin.com to get some suggestions for how to raise my branding on my own name and I got some great answers. I have implemented these suggestions and will see how they work. The top suggestion email came from Scott Allen from http://entrepreneurs.about.com/

#1 – Put your name in your site title, e.g., “Jason Burns’ Philoking.com”, etc. The title tag is the single most important piece of content on your site regarding search engines.
#2 – You don’t seem to have an “About me” page on your site. Create an About page and make the URL http://philoking.com/jason-burns (or /pages/jason-burns or whatever)
#3 – Modify your template so that Jason Burns in the “Posted by…” is a hyperlink to the About page you just created.
#4 – Write some articles (at least 10) and submit them to EzineArticles.com and maybe a couple of others. In your byline, make your name a hyperlink to the About page from step 2.
Do that and I can just about guarantee you you’ll be #1 for just your name within 30 days. And then you can buy me a chai latte.

Thank you very much for the tip and you can guarantee that if it works I’ll do more than buy you a tea!

I would love for this to become more of a live SEO discussion, please comment and tell me how you have helped brand your website.