I read a recent treatise on blog titles and traffic spikes at my ole stompin ground: DigitalGrit. As we know, blogs are great vittles for the search spider; rich content frequently updated. So the question is, will placing some highly topical keywords within my blog and in the title, such as Paris Hilton, Brittany Spears, Chicago White Sox, Google, Google & Google and Scooter Libby cause a marked increase in traffic?
Of course visitors will be highly disappointed that the Paris sex tapes or Brittany's baby pictures, nor the Google record earnings nor the transcript of Libby's indictment - nor the latest news on Katrina aftermath will be found on this blog. But maybe, just maybe a few new readers will stay around to see what I write next. Hmmmm Harriet Miers? Iraq War? Podcasting?
I'll let you know the results.
<<< The answer is not really. As one of the commenters pointed out, the other side of the coin is relevancy. If my blog was about Baseball, then the use of White Sox would provide for a spike. White Sox is a highly topical word due to their World Series success. However, my site is about online marketing. Not a high degree of relevance with the White Sox. The morale to the story; remain relevant and they will come <grin>.
Quick update (1/2/2006): My tracking software reports that this blog entry has been found/read in a high number of Brittany Spear web searches. In fact, we reached page three of MSN search for Brittany Spears Baby (and page one for brittany spears new baby). Interesting that all of these results came from MSN Search. Does that speak to MSN search relevancy? I'll let you decide.
Yes, it's all about relevance. The Petville blog was a case in point -- a relevant post about Paris Hilton's pet ferret was published, and traffic spiked. (And spiked again when a photo was later added and the post republished.) On the DigitalGrit blog, a timely post about Google, which was well within our range of topics, saw an increase in visits.
So....yes, keyword-driven posts (as opposed to *keyword-stuffed* posts) are effective, so long as the keywords -- and the posts themselves -- are on-topic for your blog.
(Of course, we know keyword-stuffing works, too, or splogs wouldn't be so darned popular, would they? But just because they work, doesn't mean they're ETHICAL. Or that they won't eventually get you blacklisted by the search engines...)
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