Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
My site: began as a topical/expert site in 1999, grew to perhaps 100k pageviews per month over several years, and I put on about 500 articles in that time. I self-published a book, and in the process of trying to promote it for free, learned a lot more about organic SEO traffic.
In one month late 2004, I put up 90 new pages on various keyphrases (keywords containing multiple words; phrase is a more accurate term in my literary estimation), and boosted traffic to about 300k pageviews per month. My adsense revenue went from $1200 to $4000 per month- yippee skipee. Have perhaps 150 backlinks... hard to tell as you know. Pagerank 5.
Then I analyzed the pages that had worked and those that hadn't and found a formula for analyzing keyphrases- how likely I was to get a good ranking on them. I found so many good keyphrases that I couldn't write about them all- all different topics. I did a few tests- humorous articles on a keyphrase, serious articles about topics unrelated to my overall site topic - and even got ranked for those. This was Nov 2004.
Then I got a bunch more writers and put up about 1000 pages in 4 months. The plan was to 'partner' with G to put up quality info with real writers - hopefully to take the place of those despicable scraper sites so we could actually serve searchers. 600k pageviews in Feb 2005. 5 figure AdSense incomes for Jan and Feb.
Then March 19th hit. Yes, 19th- that's when my traffic dropped to about 1/3 previous. I checked page rankings , and where I'd had 60% of new pages on the 1st page G results for their phrase, I now had 5%- most of them had moved to 2nd and 3rd page. Avg rank went from about 11 to 22. Income dropped to 25% of previous.
After laying in bed for 2 days... ;-)
I did a number of tests, came up with an alternate web strategy, etc. but then ran into aforementioned friend who recommended these forums- which contain some help but loads of theory and argument- fine, I understand the point of it. :-) The overarching msg from senior members was to be patient, do nothing, or keep doing what you had been doing.
Still, this friend pointed out I didn't always have meta description tags, I had no alt tags... and I noticed that on his site he had increased his internal linking. I also noticed that many now successful sites had folders with their keywords (single words) in them. I wasn't using many links at all with the keyphrase in it. These seem to be reasonable white hat SEO techniques that will help SEs without me gaming. Just better SEO web design.
So I wanted to make changes, but was busy with a new CMS setup etc. so I waited.
To be clear, what I did do that worked before was this:
find vulnerable (low supply) keyphrases that ppl actually search on (overture)
put keyphrase in title, h1, h2, h3, in text about 7 times
always had keyphrase in meta keyword tag
usually had keyphrase in meta descr tag
my new optimization ideas:
major keywords in directory structure
alt tags
more internal linking
Both internal linking and directory structure are complicated to deal with when you have all kinds of topics, thousands of keyphrases... was puzzling out the latter yesterday.
Enough- any thoughts?
