NoIndex on Categories and Tags

I've been hesitating to to this but I finally added noindex to my tags and categories (through the All-in-One SEO tool for WordPress). I hesistated to do this because I do occasionally get traffic from search engines that land on these tags/categories. Not much but doing this will cause me to lose a few visitors a day.

My thought is that losing those few will worth it if avoiding these strengthens the value of my other pages. I'm really not sure how I'm going to measure how successful this is, though.

I also removed the tag cloud from the footer of my site. No one was ever using it so I thought it would be better to include it on my Archives page. That way, people looking for particular posts would find it there.

Other than these changes my SEO attempts have been pretty boring: Social Media submissions, more Yahoo! Answers and the like.

I also created an account at MyBlogLog to see if that helps generate any visitors activity. I have my doubts it will. I did a search there for "dating advice" and it's basically what you would expect: a whole lot of garbage. I suspect that having to rising above all the "noise" may prove the site to be less valuable. If someone were looking to find an online dating advice community, it would really be random chance if they found me.

Forum Posting

I decided to post at a forum I visit from time to time and link to an article I had written. I was sure to pick something I believed the readers would find valuable and also explained in my forum post why.

I did get some traffic from this but unfortunately my forum post didn't generate any conversation. I'm a little disappointed by that because (and I guess this is always the case) I had thought I picked something people would want to talk about.

I know posting on forums is one recommended method of generating traffic but between everything else I'm just not sure when I would have time to post on a community forum enough to become a real "member".

AdWords Not Going As I Expected

This being my first experience using AdWords, I'm a little surprised by how things are working. I expected to see my rather low daily limit eaten up in the first day but what has actually happened is that I go zero clicks at all!

I had 200+ impressions which in the grand-scheme of things isn't much so I probably need to either a) be patient or b) raise what I'm willing to pay per click. Still, I do worry that maybe my poor marketing skills are showing in how I'm writing my Ad. I'll give it a few more days and if things stay the same I may start tinkering with the text (which is a pretty annoying since Google has to approve it each time).

Thoughts on My Spike in Traffic

As I mentioned in a previous, my site saw a spike in traffic due to eHarmony's free weekend. Something that was very interesting here though: I have good rank for the free weekend (top 5 for most search queries) and this rank seemed to be passed along to my other posts. For example, I have a post on eHarmony prices and another arguing whether or not the service is worth using. Both of these articles jumped to the first page and for some queries were number 1.

Then, as the free weekend is passing, these "related" articles jumped to the first page have reset to their original position. I'm not an SEO expert and I don't even know what this means but it was very interesting to see.

Testing AdWords

Well, I've decided to try AdWords to see if that helps better drive traffic I'm looking for (that is, people who are looking for dating advice). I'm setting a very small budget and will try it for a month or two depending on how far my investment goes.

I created one campaign with two ad groups. In the first group I'm targeting people looking for dating advice and in the second I'm targeting shy people who are looking for dating advice. I've never really marketed myself as "advice for the shy", but as a shy person I did have to overcome quite a bit of my own anxiety as well as a lot of bad advice written for shy people by other people who only understand shyness to the degree that they've read about it.

My campaign has been running for an hour now and only has 14 views and 0 clicks so I'll be trying to add some more keywords today. I went light on the keywords because I wanted a very particular audience but between my low budget and my target audience I'm just not seeing enough opportunity. We'll see how things go over the next few days.

Social Network Submissions

One thing I discovered a few days ago was that much of my older content isn't being indexed. As a way to get more readers to this content and possibly get it back on Google's radar I've been submitting these articles to several different social networks (primarily Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit).

It seems like one out of ten submissions gains some traction and sends me some traffic (some but not much). Still, it's easy to do so I'll continue to try to get all of my older content submitted.

eHarmony Free Weekend Drives Spike in Traffic

Every time eHarmony has a free event, I post about it on my site. I'm normally on the first page of Google for the event (as long as I can submit it early enough). This time for many of the searches I'm in the top 5 for many of the search terms and this is driving about double the traffic I would normally see. I think it's great but I do wish this was from a more permanent source - my traffic for this search will likely start to drop today and will be all but gone by this Sunday when the event is over.