As most of you know, I was never really the type of guy who writes for search engines. If you look at my archives, you could literally see that most of my posts are titled by choice and personal preference, and not really to attract search traffic. Aside from that, I don’t really try to do keyword research and see trends and then make a blog post about it just to get some search visitors. I can say that I do probably set up the basic things on this blog search-wise but I don’t really pay that much attention to it nor do I spend a lot of efforts in it.
Obviously that worked for me ever since. I’m more about building relationships and branding myself so most of the traffic coming from this blog are either referral or direct. On my other online businesses (affiliate marketing and niche sites), I probably do more SEO but again I know that’s very little as compared to what some other marketers do.
Early last year, I got curious about writing for search. I was thinking why do people desperately do that. Are they just THAT stupid? or maybe I’m being too harsh. So one day I wrote a test post on a topic that’s trending (I wouldn’t say the topic) and after about 4 days I have seen some traffic with that certain test post. It isn’t ever massive, just about 30 a day but its fascinating because it gets that amount super consistently day by day. Just in case you’re wondering, I did that experiment using my personal blog.
Anyway back to the traffic, the blog gets very little to no traffic since its just a normal personal site but when I did do that test post I started getting 20-40 uniques a day for like up to now (2+ months) which I thought was amazing since I never really did anything after posting that.
I didn’t try generating traffic for that, all I did was wrote a rubbish article on a trending topic and then published it. There’s no maintenance whatsoever too.
Writing for search is something that I loathe and feel that I don’t need to do and obviously I have proven that with this blog and some of my other sites. But that certain test has given me some pretty good ideas on my next upcoming experiments. Am I going to write for search now? Definitely no! An increased focus on search? Maybe.
I know a lot of you here search-optimize your blogs more than I do so what do you think?