Alex Pooley's Blog

Because of their dominance in the search engine business, generating traffic through Google is often a critical part of any SEO effort. Unfortunately, traffic from Google to your web site can make or break your efforts in building an information based web site. Recently, Google turned the steady stream of traffic to one of my sites to a mere drip. This site in particular was left for 13 months as a control. In other words, I put the site online and didn’t touch it or explicitly build links for 13 months. A couple of weeks ago, without any apparent reason, traffic dropped from over a 100 unique visits per day to single digit figures.

This real life experience has highlighted the fickle nature of search traffic. Here’s another graph of the site, from inception to June 17 2008.

When the site hit its stride earlier this year, it was generating over 330 unique visitors per day from Google.

Fortunately I don’t depend on that site to pay the bills.

So what’s the deal? How did the site go from zero to hero, and back to worthless in the span of a year? The truth is that I don’t really care. The fact that anyone or anything (Google, backlinkers, malicious SEO dude), can affect my traffic flow so dramatically, leads me to question the long term viability of the long tail business model.

An important attribute of this particular site is that it did not offer a very strong point of difference, and so it was not very sticky or viral. It supplied a great breadth of basic information, and was very dependent on search engine traffic. Hence, this site existed purely to exploit the long tail.

So here’s the deal. With virtually no marketing effort I was able to take a large (200,000+ pages) generic content site and build it to over 330 unique visits per day with virtually no marketing effort. After a year, the site came round trip and found itself where it started - at single digit hits per day.

My conclusion:

1. Don’t build a long term business around search engine traffic.
2. Do use search engines to test the human interest in your site. As opposed to bot interest.
3. Ensure diversity is built in to the marketing and sales plan.

Is it coincidence that about a month ago Google had dramatically reduced my Adsense income? It’s totally irrelevant whether my trouble with Google is local to my site, or global to Google. Human behaviour has stayed consistent (so I’m led to believe) for thousands of years, while artificial intelligence is always evolving. From today forward, I’ll be targeting human behaviours, and taking the search engines as just another marketing strategy, and never my primary marketing strategy.

My conclusion, and previous experience, leads me to build this rough check list of “things to do” for my next site:

1. Build a site with something of human interest.
2. Build a subscription base with feeds, mailing lists, bookmarks.
3. Organise private advertisements.
4. Build a marketing strategy without organic search as a primary traffic driver.

I’ve had a couple of articles almost posted but I ditched them after thinking that no one reading my blog would be interested. To be honest, I don’t really know what information you are after by reading this blog. So, I’m running a poll to find out what you’re interested in :)

If you could take a second to add your vote to my poll I would really appreciate it. If you can’t find an adequate option in the poll then feel free to leave a comment. Thanks!

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My old blog design was looking a little untidy both on screen and under the hood. I recently undertook the arguably pointless task of overhauling my blog design, and upgrading to the latest Wordpress. The emphasis of this new design is on the content. I was able to crunch the side bar in to a tiny area by using a dynamic multi-level menu that fades in/out.

Updating the design was an interesting exercise and I came across a few impressive tools to help with the design and performance of the page. Here they are in no particular order:

Wordpress Theme Generator

I’ve always wanted to use Yahoo’s User Interface components with my blog design. YUI provides an excellent library of css and javascript to build rich interactive sites, while still maintaining cross browser compatibility. The navigation menu with the fade in/out to the left of the blog is an example of the YUI menu component.

The Wordpress Theme Generator allows you to modify the design in real time. I found the interface a little quirky and resorted to downloading the convenient Zip of my partial design and then hacking it to bits with vi.

All in all it’s a nice tool to get you up and going with a YUI compatible Wordpress theme.

YSlow

YSlow is an excellent FireFox plugin to determine how well your pages load, and where exactly performance improvements can be had. You will need FireBug installed to run YSlow. I managed to shave seconds in loading time by concatenating my javascript and css assets, and then deflating (mod_deflate) them via my .htaccess. The page went from about 330Kb to 80Kb.

YSlow grades your page based on several criteria, and these criteria combined result in an overall page grade. One of the criteria I believe most small time sites can safely ignore and that is the content delivery network (CDN) criteria.

Another great aspect of YSlow is that you can click on each of the criteria to learn more about the criteria. It’s a very efficient way to learn.

My site loses the majority of it’s grade because of widgets I have incorporated from third parties. For instance, MyBlogLog attaches ETags for the image files which YSlow believes are pointless. This highlights how important it is to be selective of the widgets you add to your pages (anyone been reading TechCrunch lately? ouch).

Online Stripe Generator

Wow, you know you’re around web 2.0 when the only purpose of a site is to create a tilable, striped image for web backgrounds. The interface of this tool is slick. I’ve always wanted to create striped tiles as they seem like a subtle way to brighten up a page, without distracting from the content.

WP-Cache

This Wordpress plugin is an absolute must for anyone who cares about their site visitors. WP-Cache lazy caches pages so that after the first load, the page is fetched from disk. By installing this plugin I improved my blog performance by 20% by going from a 5 second page load, to a 4 second page load. I don’t think you can really lose with this plugin, and in most cases you just need to turn it on.

Conclusion
The primary goal of this new design has been to focus on the content of the site without obtrusive distractions. The design is not fancy, but I think it’s achieved it’s goal. The tools I’ve mentioned above were a great help and I highly recommend them.