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

Not a pretty thought, is it? We set a record low for the date of 14 degrees last night at the Tallahassee airport. I sure wouldn’t want my car to veer off the road and plunge into the lake in THIS weather.

Or - actually - any other weather.

And what if that car was your blog? You sure don’t want your blog drowning, either. And that graphic you see might actually help you keep your blog afloat & effective.

Studies show there’s a big advantage, consistently, to including a graphic in your blog post. More people will start to read the post, and more will finish it. With a WordPress blog, it’s easy to add a graphic in your post.

Now … about graphics.

You can’t just right-click and “Save” any graphic you see online. Most of them are copyrighted.

However, there are some really good online sources of graphics. These 3 all have free graphics and some also have pay-for graphics, that you may find worthwhile:

IStockPhoto

Public-Domain-Photos

WPClipart

You can find a lot of other resources for free images here:

Wikipedia

If you don’t know how to post a photo in your wordpress blog, look here:

how do I post a photo in my wordpress blog?

Read the listings and choose one to try.

If you have any questions or comments, just click on the “Comments” button below. Hope you enjoy and use these great resources.

Take care,

Richard Dennis