Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category
Blogging’s best kept secret: when you look at me, I look at you
So you’ve learnt some top SEO tips, whacked the words Britney Spears and sex into every second headline, gained your first million subscribers and hyperlinked loads of cool stuff. People are falling over themselves to visit your site, right?
Well … WordPress, as I’ve written about before (click here), gives you the search terms people use en route to reading you. When I see “Innocent in Australia” or my name I sigh with relief and then say: “Go on, son, well done, mate, she’ll be right, we can do this! We can!”
But I see many other terms, too. Every fifth or sixth term these days is Stanford Who’s Who thanks to the post: Oprah Winfrey and the Stanford Who’s Who (click here).
I receive comments and messages from people – usually tales of woe. They find me because, when they type in “Standford Who’s Who”, I’m right up there, in third spot.
Go on, son! Go on!
But the biggest revelation is this: the search terms people use, and subsequently find you by, don’t relate to your headlines.
If you load your headlines with top search terms – Google is typed in 618 million times a month; Lady Gaga averages 25 million; Oprah gets 5 million – you’re facing extreme competition: unless your piece gains immediate momentum it will be swept to page 199 on Google, the end of the internet.
Far better to use terms people are looking for, but not in huge numbers. On average, 3,600 people a month search for Stanford Who’s Who and, when they do, I pounce on them.
Cracking the Shits is even less popular. Only 14o people search for this expression each month, but when they do, I’m waiting.
Well, done, mate, she'll be right.
Blogs are a two-way process. What I write gives insight into me; and the search terms people use to find me give insight into them.
The terms below – all from the last quarter – have stuck in my mind, and not always for good reasons. For the sake of illustration, I’ve divided them into character types, and present them complete with original spelling and syntax.
Many, as you would imagine, deal with sex – depraved, disturbing sex. I actually worry some of these sick bastards have become subscribers (although, if you have, woo-hoo!).
If you get the boak easily, skip the next few lines: they’re gross.
Sexy beasts/ beasts
* teen boys giving milk to other by his cock
* dad shits in boys mouth
* visible g-string above jeans edge youtube
* middle age nudewomen and younge rmen horse leg
* melbourne house party orgy when please
* spanking with pan
* massive piss flaps
Medico-curious
* sick people snot
* snot and sneeze in your face you
* why do they call snot crows
* ahh right on my coccyx
* drop dead in australia
V-J Day curious
All of these relate to the picture, reproduced below, by Alfred Eisenstaedt. Though merely mentioned in passing in a post about the SNP victory in Scottish elections (click here), it’s been a nice little traffic driver – certainly more than the SNP has been (ungrateful bastards).
The "broken-back" move is a clear winner.
That said, no-one has actually searched for “Alfred Eisenstaedt’s Times Square photo”, but rather things like:
* man woman snogging after war lovely
* kiss nurse wars over
* kissing nurse stops war
Scotland curious
* bawbag
* gaun yersel
* your a bawbag chimp
* deck him
* why im proud to be from scotland
Australia curious
* is life in australia like neighbours
* is better australia or scotland
* bogan as
Seeking instruction
* how to break into holden nova
* how to get out of going to your dad’s
Sartorial
* where can you buy rastafarian hat in sydney
* cat flap british haircut
* rasta hats melbourne
* grey fitted blazer adelaide
Miscellaneous
* getting married at 8pm
* saltwater combover
* middle age man melbourne
* psychiatrists christmas card
* maroon bedroom ideas for kids
There’s one I rate above all others, though. I like to imagine the person who wrote it on their back in a driveway, a monkey wrench in one hand, a can of oil in the other. Though sweating and dirty, this person feels pretty pumped.
He or she stands up from the driveway and walks into the house, stepping out of the filthy overalls. Those biceps look pretty good in the mirror, don’t they?
Now, what shall I type into Google? I know:
* working on my car feeling manly
Go champ!
Thanks for reading.
Part 5 of 5
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Hyperlinks (and tits)
The way hyperlinks are anchored or seeded in copy causes consternation in certain circles.
Essentially, it boils down to whether it’s better to say “click here“, thereby giving readers clear direction (a bit like someone shouting “jump” really loudly when your at the edge of a cliff), or to embed your links subtly as you go.
For sure, the constant clamouring of blue or purple lettering in an otherwise monotone text can be off-putting.
But it depends what’s being linked to: if it’s amazing tits or a big red dong, people are more likely to click.
A passing link to Synthesis of lamellar niobic acid nanorods via proton-exchange and their conversion to T-Nb2O5 nanorods is way less appealing – especially in an article about tits.
Because so few people read them, links are a labour of love on the part of the writer.
Getting to links means cracking through the ice of a text, rescuing those pages and pictures bobbing helplessly under the surface? – it’s an inconvenience, and generally you can’t be arsed.
They’re simply footnotes, or those little numbers in modern editions of Dickens next to “cutting the throats of the Graces” and other obscure phraseology. Who actually flicks to page 487 to get the full explanation? Erm, I do … sometimes.
In their defence, hyperlinks do a few important things:
1) They show there’s a primary source, whether or not you choose to verify it, even just to make sure the author’s not having a laugh at your expense.
2) Well thought-out hyperlinks give you more than the link to some crappy Wikipedia page or a some gigantic, scholarly tome. Done well, they add real value.
3) As the writer, if you can’t be arsed, they give you an opt-out from explaining sexual selection or macropodidae, or even describing something as simple as two kangaroos shagging in front of stunned boy.
One less obtrusive approach is the Easter egg link – seemingly random gifts that take your most diligent readers in new directions. Whether a word or a single letter, they’re saying: you won’t see me, but I’m here, blue and waiting, like the undead …
Sometimes links can lead you down a dirty black hole or to a horrific dead end, and that’s frustrating …
By the way, did you see the previous three posts in this series?
Click here to read How I got my first million blog subscribers
Click here to read Sex gives SEO a spanking
Click here to read Gaga Lady Spears Britney Claiming: Charlie Bit My Finger
How valuable have the insights been so far? What are people really looking for online?
More of that later … maybe tomorrow.
Part 4 of 5
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Click here for part 3
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How I got my first million blog subscribers
Whenever you see this headline or its many variations be very wary – they get you when you’re least expecting it, when you’re feeling needy of 1,000,000 readers. And beyond … the headline promises not just a million subscribers but your first million. There will be more. More!
This headline comes from the same stable as Get 1 Billion Twitter Followers in 4 Easy Steps and the like – it’s a confidence trick that’s by no means new.
We all know that, to make a million dollars, you write a book called How to Make a Million Dollars, Get Rich Quick, or Anyone Can Do it.
Not one of these books features a section by the author/ghostwriter explaining how they made their million(s) from reading this kind of book.
There’s a technical name for this kind of headline: wank.
It plays to the shortcut gene, the same one activated by Become a Judo Black Belt in 10 Minutes and How to Learn French in Five Short Lessons.
Have you ever met anyone who did this?
It’s far better to get up early in the mornin’, tryna make a move, like my good friend Fiddy, who offers practical, everyday tips on getting rich (or dying in the process). I find I’ll Whip Ya Head Boy particularly instructive.
I speak Spanish as the result of six years formal study and year-long/months-long chunks in Spanish-speaking countries, enormous dedication, prolonged, you know, trabajo.
When it comes to writing, the implication is that having more readers is better. And I agree. Anyone who writes would agree.
But subscriptions are not a guide to readership figures, only to people who have clicked on “subscribe”. Inboxes around the world creak under the weight of subscription emails never opened and never deleted, that have become, in a sense, invisible.
My preferred rule of thumb is this: if people get past the first four words of your piece you’re doing well. Anything else is a bonus.
If you can go one better and encourage optional extras – if anyone clicks on those painfully-researched hyperlinks, say – you’re a frigging legend.
How do you get people to click on those? More of that later … maybe tomorrow.
Part 3 of 5
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Sex gives SEO a spanking
Writing about sex is like painting sound – not easy. Edvard Munch tried to paint sound in his student-bedroom favourite The Scream, but that doesn’t sound like anything …
And yet the idea persists that sex sells in a written format. Why? Because it’s true. Just the mention of the word can get people’s legs twitching, regardless of how incongruous the link.
The UK’s 2002 Iraq Dossier, with it’s 45-minute claim, was racy; but the fact it was said to be “sexed up” gave it added frisson – journalists everywhere had the horn for months, and any time “sexed up” could be used in a sentence or headline it was used.
Dr David Kelly, of course, who came forward as the source of the “sexed up claim”, committed suicide in woods near his Oxfordshire home shortly after the story broke – not hugely raunchy as an event, although people tried to sex even this up as a conspiracy involving MI5, oh, ah, ohhhh …
Why does sex play so well with readers? Because it’s way more alluring than famine, unless it’s a story about Teri Hatcher’s four year sex famine.
The keyword tool Google AdWords seems to back this up. The figures below chart the number of times words are entered into the company’s search engine. The numbers on the left are global monthly searches; those on the right are Australian monthly searches …
| fellatio | 1,500,000 | 165,000 | ||
| sex | 618,000,000 | 68,000,000 | ||
| spanking | 5,000,000 | 1,500,000 | ||
| bum | 7,480,000 | 673,000 | ||
| blowjob | 9,140,000 | 3,350,000 | ||
| boobs | 24,900,000 | 7,480,000 | ||
| knockers | 201,000 | 90,500 | ||
| arse | 1,500,000 | 201,000 | ||
| earthquake | 11,100,000 | 5,000,000 | ||
| plague | 1,220,000 | 550,000 | ||
| drought | 550,000 | 246,000 | ||
| famine | 1,220,000 | 550,000 | ||
| orgasm | 7,480,000 | 2,740,000 | ||
You’ll notice “sex” trumps everything, with 618 million searches a month, roughly 606 million more than “earthquake”; and that nearly 7 million more people search for “bum” on a monthly basis than “drought”.
Of course, the internet’s about more than reading. One recent study found 85% of males and 15% of females view porn on the internet regularly. Other sources suggest the female porn-ogling figure may be closer to 60%, with 17% of women describing themselves as “addicted”.
Stuff you read about sex online tends to be biological (fine, if you like birds and mice), instructional (way too challenging physically) or “erotic” (usually rubbish).
Why rubbish? Because the text is loaded with voiceless velar plosives – the K sound mostly – “cock”, “suck” and “fuck” being the obvious ones; but also “silk”, “cape” and the almost-instantly-orgasmic “croquet” – go on, whack some balls … On the page, these words get boring really quickly.
Feathering and flirting with the issue at hand is key.
T.S Eliot called this the objective correlative: a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for that particular emotion
Sex can be earnest; or surreal and earnest; or surreal and earnest and sinister. It can be meaningfully surreal, even if you can’t quite grasp the meaning; or excitingly earnest. But can sex be earnest and sinister without dirt? That’s virtually unimaginable … and undesirable. There’s no poetry without dirt.
The following passage is one of my favourites: a barmaid and land surveyor have sex on a grubby floor under the jovial gaze of two male “assistants” while the barmaid’s “master” moves about in the next room.
[…] they embraced each other, her little body burned in K.’s hands, in a state of unconsciousness which K. tried again and again but in vain to master as they rolled a little way, landing with a thud on Klamm’s door, where they lay among the small puddles of beer and other refuse gathered on the floor. There, hours went past, hours in which they breathed as one, in which their hearts beat as one, hours in which K. was haunted by the feeling that he was losing himself or wandering into strange country, farther than ever man had wandered before, a country so strange that not even the air had anything in common with his native air, where one might die of strangeness, and yet whose enchantment was such that one could only go on and lose oneself further.
And then: Where were his hopes? What could he expect from Frieda now that she had betrayed everything?
And then: He had spent a whole night wallowing in puddles of beer, the smell of which was nearly overpowering.
And then: There on the bar counter sat his two assistants, a little heavy-eyed for lack of sleep, but cheerful. It was a cheerfulness arising from a sense of duty well done.
A masterful piece of writing? Incontrovertibly! One to get your rocks off to? Probably not.
But if straight, Route-A sex vocabulary is the way to search-engine heaven, why are there not more articles with the headline Tits Tits Tits?
Because most writers are looking for your love, not a one-night stand? Even lowly bloggers such as this one.
How do you build loyalty and move towards your first million subscribers? More of that later … maybe tomorrow.
Part 2 of 5
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Innocent in Australia 
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