When I write, I stress over whether my words are fun to read, their value to your business change efforts, and whether I’m talking about the same topics too often. We don’t get a tremendous number of comments here, so I rely on feedback I get from other sources. Yesterday’s article on how Google PageRank works generated its share of feedback, with Tweets like this one, email, and comments all coming in.
And then I started thinking about something that’s never far from my mind.
No matter how great a job you do on your Search Engine Optimization and regardless of the effort you put into tracking results, you won’t ever have a nearly complete picture.
At the top of this piece you can see a graphic showing the traffic for my White Paper on Google’s Secret Sauce and SEO, which was referenced in yesterday’s article. When I grabbed that screen shot the article had been viewed 938 times.
Earlier in the day, when setting up the link to the Secret Sauce White Paper, I happened to notice that the view count, started eight months ago, was at 901. 37 additional views in just a few hours is…a nice bump, if not an exciting gross number. And let’s face it: nine times the average daily viewership—and more like 36 times average if we count hours elapsed instead of a full day—coming so suddenly can only mean that yesterday’s article created that traffic.
Which is, of course, a pretty strong argument for long-tail marketing. Which isn’t my point.
Six hours after I posted that article, which generated those 37 hits on the white paper, the article itself had registered just 10 hits. How is it possible that just 10 views of the article were responsible for 37 hits on a piece it linked out to?
Because there were more than 10 hits on the article. Just not here.
The words I write get picked up and distributed by other web sites. I have mixed feelings about that, but as long as the formatting and collateral information is left intact I still benefit from others violating my copyrights and pretending my words are theirs. I also benefit from these words showing up in RSS feeds and other redistribution channels.
Click … click … click …
I guess this piece is about Long Tail Marketing, after all. And long tail marketing is an absolutely crucial part of your Search Engine Optimization strategy.
Click…click…click
In fact, click here, and we can talk about your SEO plans.
Trackbacks/Pingbacks