I have been looking at ways to write weblog articles that are both interesting to my readers as well as likely to be ranked high on search engines like Google.com. This thought pattern was ignited by Shawno and Jen on Hypernonsense.com; a podcast about… well… they talk about everything. This past week they read an article about a dolphin found dead near Jon Bon Jovi’s house. The writer threw in several names not really important to the story; names like Barack Obama and Al Gore. When I looked them up on Google’s Keyword search, I found they were searched very heavily.

This thought pattern led me to think about what I might be able to write about that would lend itself to keyword searches bringing more traffic to my weblog. That is what we all ultimately want in the long run anyway, right? How can I use the Google Keyword Tool to invite others to visit this page?

There are two different approaches to using the Google Keyword Tool. When you are using websites like Squidoo.com, you have to find keywords that have not been searched to death. What do I mean? So many people have been using Squidoo.com so much, it is hard to get people to look at your Squidoo Lens because there are hundreds of others just like it that have already been made.

The other approach would be for weblogs who might not have the best Google Pagerank. I am in the belief that if I can bring in as many high searched for keywords as I can, I would be able to get to the top of the search listings because people would be narrowing their searches. If they look up something that has 50,000,000 listings, I am counting on the fact that they will add several more words to the search to better find what they are looking for. If I can find several high searched for words, maybe they will find my post and then be interested enough to take a look at the other 600+ blog posts I have written over the past 3 years.

This post is going to be the experiment. I will see how it does over the next few months and will post several updates below when I find out the results. If you found this page using a search engine (or any other means) take a moment and let me know how you got here and what keywords you used to find me. Where was I on the search you did? Leave a comment.

January 5, 2009 – I have been blogging for over two years and I have not really spent a lot of time adding tags to my blog posts. I have done a number of other things to improve my google rating; things like making sure the title of my blog post shows up in the URL of the post. I also made sure that the RSS feed is showing up in the correct spots. I have found that a decent community on facebook helps drive some traffic to my website; so does having a squidoo page or two that point back to the weblog

As of today I am averaging about 200-300 visits per day. That is not huge, but is more than the average blogger. My goal is to see if tagging the blog posts will actually draw more traffic to my weblog. I am thinking the tags will make the posts easier to search on google and other search engine sites.

I checked the number of blog posts that I have written. They are in the 600+ range. That is a lot of posts to have to go back and tag. I am going to systematically go back and add tags to each and every blog post. This is going to take a long time; especially since I want to go back and move all the images to flickr.com while I add all these tags.

Moving the images will do two things for me. It will open up the space on my website so I can write many more articles without upgrading my website. The second thing it will do is create a bigger presence on flickr.com. When people search for things on flickr and find my photos, they will find links to the appropriate blog post, hopefully drawing more traffic to my blog.

I will continue to monitor the hits on my website over the next few months and report them as updates on this blog post. If you are reading this months or even years after I have written it, I hope it has been helpful in showing you what I have done to increase the traffic to my site. Please feel free to take a moment to comment on this post and leave any other tips on driving more traffic to your website.

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January 16, 2009 – The number of hits I have been receiving over the past week or so has been improving. At the beginning of the week I received just over 200 hits throughout the day. Yesterday I broke 300. This was the first time since last November. I expect them to continue to go up.

I have been adding tags to a number of my old posts and I will continue to add those tags until I have caught up with all the old posts. I have also been adding the tags to all my new posts so I won’t have to go back and add them later.

I have also updated my account with OnlyWire.com. There are several more services that they link to that I need to join, but I am pleased to know they now update for google, yahoo, digg, facebook, myspace and many others.

Just to clarify, OnlyWire.com is a website that will automatically post your webpage URLs and blog posts to more than twenty bookmarking sites. This site saves me so much time. I have not used it at all in nearly a year. I think I am going to make its use part of my blogging routine along with adding tags to each and every post.

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March 27, 2009 – The weblog is averaging about 325 hits per day right now. I personally don’t think it has much to do with the tags I am adding to the posts. I think most of it has to do with the consistancy I am writing and the number of friends I have on Facebook, twitter, and other social media. Every time I make an upday to a post or write something new, Facebook updates with links to my blog, letting more than 2600 people know what I am working on.

I will continue to observe what is happening and will let you all know what is happening.

Every now and then I surf the internet looking for ways to make some extra cash. Among my recent money making searches on the internet, I found a website by this man, Steve Pavlina. He has compiled a site of his blog entries about self development. Through his blogs he supports and talks about different merchandise and gets commission on whatever is sold though his website. The strange thing is, he writes about things that are interesting to him and goes into long discussions about what he has discovered about each product. His blog is ultimately more than just a selling blog. He really offers some great insight to some interesting subjects. Now, I don’t agree with everything that he talks about, but his openness and complete intelligence on the subjects he talks about astounds me.

I thought I could do something similar with my own website. I figure that if I can use my website to talk about things that interest me, I might draw some interest to the site and maybe earn a little extra income through the google adsense ads and maybe through Amazon.com and making some commission on their products.

I brainstormed a little on this idea over the weekend. I have decided that it would be possible to draw a weekly illustration that has something to do with what I want to talk about. Then I will write a blog entry to go along with it. I don’t want this site to just be about selling things, though. I want to actually write something that people will actually want to read. Something that will gain interest and bring people back every week to see what I have to talk about.

I am also thinking about posting a weekly New DVD Release listing. I know that I always want to know what is coming out on DVD. This will hopefully help me be more consistent about keeping my New DVD Release listing up to date. This idea is all about consistency. I want to work on this website continuously. I think if I can consistently update it, People will consistently come back to see what I have added. If I can consistently update my portfolio and webcomic, there will be enough interest in this webpage and maybe someone will actually want to use my Graphic Design knowledge.

So…

I am going to post this as my first website article. I am going to pray that someone reads it and tells their friends about it. Then maybe their friends will come here and take a look around and see what interesting things I have to talk about. Who knows. Maybe everyone will love listening to be banter on and on about nothing. If I can consistently update this page once a week, I might try to write and update more often.

Keep looking up.