How Will Your Blog Benefit From Being Properly Optimized?

At the start of 2009 I set up several blogs to use as an experiment in SEO, as a beginner blogger with no real knowledge of search engine optimization or the importance of keywords or backlinks, this experiment was for my own benefit and learning experience. I have started to see some results for the various methods I have tried regarding the level each blog had been optimized to.

SEO Experiment

Firstly I will explain the purpose and aim of the experiment, the experiment was purely a personal one, a challenge to see how much I could learn about SEO and to what level a beginner like myself could implement this knowledge with the aim being, like so many others, to increase traffic/stats and earnings from a hosted blog without any financial input.

With limited time (and knowledge) the results are only a fraction of what they could be, but the purpose was to see if this was a route worth pursuing and the results show that if I were to continue and further put this knowledge to use there are numerous benefits that could be gained.

Search Engine Optimization – Results

The experiment was firstly to increase organic traffic to each blog, using three different blogs all created in roughly the same time period, each one newly created and not yet indexed in google and each on a different topic. The topics were not chosen with keywords in mind but simply because they were topics I could write content for easily (or at least I thought I could)

The second part was to see if organic traffic from search engines provided a higher click through rate for adsense in comparision to the click through rate I was receiving from social traffic on my other blogs

I created the three blogs and used each differently, the only research done with each was to make sure they were all on a topic that had a decent search volume and the point was not to end up with one or even two great blogs but to find out which was showing potential and I should note here that I did not do any link building for any of the blogs as the traffic results I wanted were not for volume but source.

The first blog was for the most part un-optimized, the url and title used the keywords and the blog focused on the topic chosen but post titles etc were not optimized.

The second blog was created with SEO in mind, from the url to the title and description and each post title and the content.

The third blog was also created with SEO in mind but with a slightly different approach to content and keywords, the content was created with keywords I wanted to rank for but the topic was much broader and also the topic would not appeal to non – technical search visitors, which is important to note for adsense results.

I added a link to each blog for indexing purposes. As well as adding them to resources like technorati etc and each blog had and still has only an average of about three links pointing to it.

The first blog was indexed in one day, the second was indexed in five and the third was indexed in two.

Each blog as expected, started out slowly, and as I am continuing to learn and tweak each the results over time will change. Over the course of two months the average stats and income potential have shown me the following: (stats are all from Google analytics)

Blog 1: The unoptimized blog.  Traffic source results

The average percentage of search engine traffic to this blog over the time period is 9.70% of all traffic

Blog 2: Optimized blog. Traffic source results

The average percentage of search engine traffic to this blog over the time period is 73.03%

Blog 3: Optimized blog with less focused content

The average percentage of search engine traffic to this blog over the time period is 53.07%

(Note – Each blog recieved a relativly similar volume of traffic – all within roughly 50 visits of the others – only the traffic sources varied)

Earning results from Adsense

As far as I am aware it is against adsense’s TOS to reveal  exact ctr figures so I will simply list the blogs in the order of highest earning:

Blog Two – This blog recieved the most clicks, over twice the amount of clicks of the second highest.

Blog One – This blog was un- optimized but still recieved clicks although less than half the amount of the fully optimized blog.

Blog Three – This blog recieved very few clicks (due to topic I assume)

The Benefits of onsite SEO

So to sum up I have learned that optimizing a blog can greatly increase the amount of search engine/targeted traffic I recieve while not actually making much difference to the traffic volume(without backlinks)  the earning potential from targeted traffic is much higher than from non targeted/social traffic.

I have also learned that for earning potential it is best to focus on a niche that appeals to general visitors rather than other bloggers. Picking the right topic is essential.

At this point I have to say the content for all of the above blogs was average, original but not my main focus.  Much of the results above were expected and is common knowledge to many as in: targeted traffic = income potential

This experiment was for me, to see what I could do with the information and my research, I now have a clearer idea of what to focus on and where to go from here which was my aim overall.

Read more posts about Search Engine Optimization

SEO- Choosing Keywords for Search engine rankings

SEO To Get In To Google

SEO For Beginners