Bootstrapping Your Search Presence Using WordPress Blog Stats

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Examine your search statistics to create higher traffic blog posts

I knocked out this small post for a friend a while back: Head vs. Header

As of the next morning, someone did a search for “why wordpress modifies head” and found that post. I saw the search term listed on my Blog Stats page.

I immediately revised the article slightly, to scoop up the search terms, which are now incorporated quite naturally into the text of the article.

The last check showed the article on Google’s first page for several related queries.

Not bad…

But, what did I just do?

Bootstrapping content based on search results

Long time readers (you know who you are) recall Website In A Weekend is creating 101 articles that will serve as flagship content. Part of this strategy consists of developing content using search statistics, which are useful for these reasons:

Enhance existing articles
Develop new articles

There’s no guessing about what people want to read when you see the search terms, and every reason to use this information to better serve their needs. Here’s how…

Enhance existing blog posts

Suppose you sit down one day and just pound out what you considered a relatively unimportant blog post. It fit your mood at the time, perhaps it served a specific purpose when you wrote it, and you felt it was important enough to lock in some knowledge.

And this crappy little post starts sucking in most of your traffic! Much more so than your “pride and joy” articles resulting from days of slaving away.

The irony of it all.

Watch the search terms for these posts. When you see a “hit” for a key word or phrase that you haven’t used, but you should have used (because it fits), revise the article to naturally incorporate that phrase or those keywords, and when appropriate, add to your SEO keywords field as well.

When your article really is a hit, this will get you even more keywords and phrases. Repeat the process with the new keywords and phrases. You don’t have to use the exact phrases either, use what sounds natural. When in doubt, read the new material out loud to make sure it doesn’t sound forced and unnatural.

If you do this a few times, you will find the article creeping up in search results, and that there is a natural stopping point where you rank really high (first or second page of Google), with no further effort.

Note: Do NOT try and force keywords where they don’t belong. I recently read an article on email autoresponders, and the author had used the word “autoresponder” 3 or for dozen times in around 500 words. Interestingly, he didn’t rank that highly in Google results, I found the article through a related website link.

Developing new articles

Suppose you have maximized the potential for an article. It’s way up on the first page of Google, and you’re sucking in all the relevant keywords. Further revision is pointless.

So write a new article.

It’s easy. Pick any topic sentence in the high-traffic article, and write a post using that paragraph as a basis for an article. (Recall the topic sentence in a paragraph is usually the first sentence.) Write this new article using some of the keywords and phrases that hit the existing article, but take a different perspective… head off in a new direction.

What you’re looking for is traction on the new article’s topic. If you start to get hits on the new article’s keywords and phrases, repeat the revision process outlined above.

There is no end game to these two processes. You can use them in your writing—ALL of your writing— in any context, for any venue, for as long as you want to write.

Useful tools

Wordpress.com blogs stats 8:11 am, July 8 2009

My main tool at the time of writing is the Wordpress.org stats plugin. One of the most useful capabilities of this tools is the report on search engine terms which is delivered on the same page as the readership stats. You can get this same information (and a lot more) using Google Analytics, but having these simple statistics right in the WordPress blog administration interface is really, really handy.

At right above shows what recent search term (at the time of writing) results look like on the WordPress.com Stats page. These terms represent what people want to know, right now. As it turns out, I have most of these well-covered in existing posts… but I would like my rankings on favicon searches to get much higher. Last checked, “How to Add favicon.ico to WordPress For Professional Appearance” didn’t even rank in the top 100 search results on Google. Which is a pity for readers, because it’s objectively one of the better articles on the topic of favicons for WordPress. Since it’s now showing up in search results, it’s time to revise and sharpen the article to get even better results!