gothwalk | Musings on Search Terms

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I was talking to graylion this evening about site optimisation for search engines, and I’ve been thinking about it since. The first and major purpose of SEO (search engine optimisation) is attract traffic. The next step is to attract good traffic. I’m finding that the more niche-oriented your site is, and the narrower your niche, the better quality traffic you’re going to get. Better quality for me, since I’m not selling anything, is when someone lands on the site, and hits more than one page (and ideally, heads out via the google ads, but I can’t easily directly measure that).

In Ranelagh has a pretty narrow niche to start, and this means that most people who hit it are already seeking information about Ranelagh. So they look at two or three, maybe as many as ten pages. dukestreet.org, on the other hand, hadn’t much of a niche until recently, and while it was seeing more traffic than In Ranelagh, it wasn’t good traffic. But as I’ve put up more and more articles on Doctor Who and MMORPGs, it’s beginning to find niches to work in, and the quality of traffic is going up.

I’ll be very interested to see what happens to the traffic on A Political Education as the search engines begin to direct people there - is it going to pick up lots of wide, poor quality traffic, or is it going to find niches to work in as well? I honestly don’t know at this stage.