What do Al Capone & I have in common? Tell you in a minute. But first, about Blog Traffic Techniques …

The Bad

In a Google search for Blog Traffic Techniques, I find the Blog Traffic Techniques Digg page listed #3 of 520,000 Google results.

#3 on page 3 of Google results is a “Friendfeed” url that links to Blog Traffic Techniques through Social Median.

And yesterday was the most visitors my blog has ever had in 1 day – 93. But the BTT page itself is not listed in the first 5 pages of Google results. Time to play detective. I’ll keep you posted on what I find …

The Good
I guess in some cases, Google has to think on it awhile. On the Google Drools page, I listed 2 articles of 20 I submitted as getting no Google listing in the first 3 pages of results. Take a look at them now:

Branding Promotion Methods – now #1 of over 27 million results!

Free Blog Marketing Ideas – now #1 of over 11 million results.

Definitely brightened my day.

The Ugly
Did I ever mention that my friends now call me “Scarface” … just like Al Capone? Long story, but I definitely earned that nickname. I’ll tell you about it sometime.

Richard

If you’ve done an analysis of Google Drools, you know we have a content advertising system that can get #1 rankings on Google searches almost at will. Some search engine results really tickle me. Click on this writing niche article I submitted a couple days ago:

Plan for Writing Good Articles

It’s #1 on Google … against over 30 MILLION competing pages! But I digress.

A big part of my productivity optimization plan has been to post unique, targeted articles at a popular website with a proven strong connection to Google – like EzineArticles.com. Ultimately, you want to build your blog into that type of high quality, interactive, authority website, with lots of inbound links.

As with any marketing promotion, this one needs to be tested and measured and proven. Recently, I’ve seen a not-very-well-known blogger get high Google rank on a moderately competitive keyword by publishing a simple post with (1) good latent semantic indexing and (2) a keyword-rich title.

That tactic is pretty exciting, because those 2 performance factors are certainly the easiest to achieve. Becoming a visible and recognized authority website with a ton of inbound links will definitely take longer. If you can skip that qualification, then you can have profitable results much sooner.

And that’s the focus of this post. My blog is certainly not a branded authority resource to Google. Net Traffic Machine is still only a couple months’ old. It only has a couple dozen posts.

And so THIS post is a mission to test whether NTM can achieve high Google rank for the keyword phrase blog traffic techniques. Can this signature blog content beat out 681,000 other references for top rank for this keyword phrase? If so, that is a strong indication that ranking success can come much quicker than anticipated.

Also … the importance of a high Google listing is that:

1. You’re not paying for it, because you’re showing up in natural search, not Google Adwords.
2. The prospects who find you are pretty much your perfect audience, because you have chosen a title that demonstrates exactly what you offer them, and they are searching for that exact product or service, or something very close to it. Sounds to me like a match made in heaven.

Why This Blog Title?
Look at this data for Google searches done today (3/23/09):

Raw Results is a normal Google search for the phrase. These results contain the search words somewhere on the results page.
Exact Match means the keyword phrase was searched with quotation marks, pulling up only pages containing that exact phrase.

Conclusions:
Consider the statistics difference between “blog traffic” and the others. Obviously, more pages will contain your 2-word phrase than your 3-word phrase. Plus … more searchers will enter a 2-word phrase than a 3-word phrase. The shorter your keyword phrase, the more searchers you’ll appeal to … but the more competition you’ll have, and the more difficult it will be to be ranked on the first page of Google results. There is no chance I’d get 1st page Google results for “blog traffic.” But choosing “blog traffic techniques” thins out the competition, but still gives me a short phrase that is likely to result in substantial popular searches.

And it’s not like the competitors are a bunch of rabid football fans or political strategists or underwater basket weavers. THESE people are webmasters and online marketers. These guys know the difference between Cpanel and HTML and RSS and SEO. They’ve studied and often gotten very good at optimizing their website traffic.

But my thinking is that there is less competition for this keyword phrase than several others on the list. So I’ll test this one first … then, if successful, go after the others one-by-one.

Optimizing the Article
I feel like I’ve talked Latent Semantic Indexing to death. If you haven’t heard the audio Google Drools, then opt-in to the right of this post, get a copy of the audio, and listen to it.

There’s just no debate that Google really values proper LSI in your articles. You can’t do keyword stuffing (many repetitions of the same keyword) – you’ll get penalized for that. But using a number of closely related words in your articles is an effective way of demonstrating to Google that this is an authority article.

Creating The Buzz
The Net Traffic Machine website was inspired by Charles Heflin’s work at Social Media Science. Charles has developed software to make it easy to promote your blog posts through social networks, getting more attention. If you haven’t read Charles’ Syndication Revelation, I highly recommend it.

So … I’m targeting this blog post for a high Google rank for the phrase blog traffic techniques. Stay tuned over the next couple weeks to see how this all works.

Richard Dennis

What can you do to get Google’s attention?

More than 20 years ago, marketing guru Jay Abraham compiled a booklet titled The 100 Greatest Headlines Ever Written. He listed his 100 top heads, followed by a paragraph or two explaining each one and why it was successful.

Here are 21 of the heads Jay chose:

1. Who Else Wants Lighter Cake – In Half The Mixing Time?
2. Little Leaks That Keep Men Poor
3. Pierced By 301 Nails, Retains Full Air Pressure
4. No More Back-Breaking Garden Chores for Me – Yet Ours Is Now The Showplace of the Neighborhood
5. Often a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride
6. How Much Is “Worker Tension” Costing Your Company?
7. To Men Who Want To Quit Work Someday
8. How To Plan Your House To Suit Yourself
9. Buy No Desk – Until You’ve Seen This Sensation of the Business Show
10. Call Back These Great Moments at the Opera
11. “I Lost My Bulges, And Saved Money Too”
12. Why (Brand Name) Bulbs Give More Light This Year
13. Right and Wrong Farming Methods – And Little Pointers That Will Increase Your Profits
14. New Cake-Improver Gets You Compliments Galore!
15. Imagine Me … Holding An Audience Spellbound For 30 Minutes
16. This Is Marie Antoinette – Riding To Her Death
17. Did You Ever See a “Telegram” From Your Heart?
18. Now Any Auto Repaid Job Can Be “Duck Soup” For You
19. New Shampoo Leaves Your Hair Smoother – Easier To Manage
20. It’s a Shame For You Not To Make Good Money – When These Men Do It So Easily
21. You Never Saw Such Letters As Harry And I Got About Our Pears

Notice anything they have in common?

Well … they all more or less announce a story. If that story appeals to you, it’s a great hook.

But guess what? Google doesn’t care. If you want high ranking in Google’s natural search (unpaid), then you need to know how to write headlines that software will drool over.

Hint #1: Don’t tell a story. Software doesn’t care about your problems or your successes.

Hint #2: Don’t promise a benefit. There’s not a benefit on earth that can get software lathered up. Why? Because it’s software!

Hint #3: Don’t get into hypnotism, magnetism, neuro-linguistic programming, or any other mind games. Software will laugh in your face … just before it falls asleep.

You already heard the biggest part of the “#1 rank in Google” formula on the How You Can Make Google Drool audio. To also create headslines that will make Google drool:

1. Use your favorite keyword tool to list a bunch of keyword phrases people search in your niche.
2. Use those phrases or rework them slightly so they make sense, and occasionally throw in one of the words that people are so often looking for with regard to any specific subject:

• advice
• guide
• ideas
• lesson
• methods
• mistakes
• model
• plan
• program
• strategy
• system
• tactics
• techniques
• tips
• tools
• tricks
• tutorial

When you come up with a title, hold it to 5 or 6 words, max. 3-4 words is better. It needs to make sense, but Google wants it short & sweet.

If you combine that kind of title with an article laden with latent semantic indexed words, and publish it on an authority site like EzineArticles.com, you have a winner … high chance of #1 rank in Google for your title.

If you want more details, opt-in to the box on the right, and you’ll receive the audio files explaining in detail how to make Google drool.

I appreciate you!

Richard Dennis

IMPORTANT!! NOTE NEW TELESEMINAR NUMBER BELOW!!!

Most marketers think that all the great inside tricks & techniques they’ve learned about headlines over the years will help them get love from Google. But here’s the problem: 90% of what you’ve learned about headlines is 100% wrong … if you want Google to hear you.

A pretty smart person once said, “It’s not what we don’t know that kills us. It’s what we DO know – that turns out to not be true.”

And so it is with headlines and Google. What you know … is just not so.

On Saturday night, March 14th, at 8:55 pm Eastern time, I’ll be doing a teleseminar where you can learn how to create headlines that can get you multiple #1 Google rankings. You’ll also learn why the most successful headlines in history, written by copywriting legends, would all fail miserably with Google.

This training could be worth a lot of money to you. To listen in, just call 1-712-432-8790, code 300300#, at 8:55 pm Eastern time, Saturday evening, March 14th. Hope you’ll join us!

I appreciate you!

Richard Dennis

PS – If you can’t be on the call, just sign up in the box on the right-hand side of this page – I’ll be sending out a link to the audio file within a few days of the call.

Oh, I’m computer literate, I suppose. But no whiz, that’s for sure. Too old for that.

I had been blogging for a long time when my buddy Charles Heflin looked at my blog one day and said, “You know, Richard … you ought to use graphics in your posts.”

And in fact, I did know that. But I’m not a techie. How could I possibly do it?

Turns out I already had the WordPress plug-in that makes it easy:

Tiny MCE Advanced WordPress plug-in

When you upload this plugin to your blog, it’s easy to feature graphics.

So, which graphics?

Well … mostly I like to lighten things up a bit. I prefer cartoons. And I just found a great source of colorful cartoons you can use for your blog graphics:

Bucchino – The Wizard of Draws

The cartoon at the start of this post is an example of his work. You need to link to his website, but just add that link in your list of Resources, and you’re free to use any of his hundreds of cartoons.

It’s a good thing.

Richard Dennis

Google and the other search engines want 3 things from you:

1) They want relevant, authority articles …

2) … with relevant, authority titles …

3) … posted on a relevant, authority website.

Let’s take these in reverse order. Today, we’ll talk about that relevant, authority website.

If you look at a lot of search results, there are some websites that come up again and again and again. For instance:

• EzineArticles.com
• Squidoo.com
• ArticlesBase.com
• and several others (do some title searches and you will find them)

Why is this? Why does Google bow to these URLs as authority sites?

I think the answer is very simple: They have many tons of incoming deep links. In other words, people not only link to EzineArticles.com, but they link to thousands of individual page URLs in hundreds of different categories at EzineArticles.com. To Google, that removes any doubt that EzineArticles is a valuable authority website.

Does Google see your blog as an authority? Maybe, if you’ve done a lot of work promoting it. Probably not, though. Not yet, anyway. You can certainly build it to an authority over time – that is the objective of Net Traffic Machine, to help you do that.

But if you’re not there yet, then where do you start? I’d suggest you start with one of these websites Google already knows and trusts explicitly, like EzineArticles.com.

Choose a category and subcategory in which to publish your articles, and then focus on that sub-category. If you follow this formula, you’ll not only draw traffic from visitors to EzineArticles.com, but your articles will be ranked on the first page of Google results for years, and you’ll get organic search traffic from Google & the other search engines.

At the same time, also publish good stuff on your blog. That way when someone reads your article at EzineArticles.com, and they use your Author’s Resource box to click through to your blog, they conclude that you are a valuable resource for them, and they put your blog on their Feed Reader, so they come back again and again and again. This dedicated following will ultimately result in more deep links to articles on your blog, which will, over time, catch Google’s attention and get your blog labelled as a relevant, authority website.

Next time, we’ll talk about titles.

Richard Dennis

It’s YOUR blog. You need to take charge from the start. If you follow this short guideline, you can be the Mad Scientist and create your own winning formula.

Almost nobody comes to your website ready to buy. Heck, these days, they need a darned good reason to even give you their contact information. They’ve already signed up for ten tons of worthless, time-wasting stuff online. You’ve got to make their eyes pop to have any impact whatsoever.

And that job is up to your website content. Your visitors are looking for help when they come to your blog. If your blog post is designed to make a sale, you have missed your visitors by a mile. They are nowhere near buying.

So you’ve got to entertain, enlighten, and/or educate. Tell them something that’s valuable to them, something they don’t already know, something that makes them say, “Oh, really?”

Recent studies have shown that a vast majority of visitors to old-style sales pages hit the “Back” button immediately. If you try to sell them on your blog, check your stats. You will see a too-high number of “bounces” (people who land on your site and go away immediately). They’ll go someplace else to find the answers they’re looking for, since they can’t get any help from you.

First, you need to really understand your prospect. What really motivates them? What do they love? What do they hate? What questions do they need answered more than anything?

Next, the best strategy to create content that searcher-prospects will salivate over is to REALLY narrow your focus. Take what you know about your prospects’ motivations and create your own very small speciality area of focus where you can be an uber-expert. Set up a Feed Reader to bring you all the research you need, and publish the best stuff on your blog.

You need to really picture the value you can provide your site visitors. Never in human history has there been so much information available. Most people, even those who know what they want, get totally overwhelmed in a hurry. If you get good at searching through lots of stuff and finding what they really, really want, then you have performed a huge service … and they won’t forget you.

“Louis, this looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship!”
– Humphrey Bogart to Claude Rains; last line of Casablanca

Richard Dennis