This is my first stab at a YOUmoz entry, I would welcome your questions or comments either publicly in the comments section or by PM.
A few months back I was reading through my daily dose of SEO blogs, and happened across this post over at BlogStorm by Patrick Altoft concerning the drop in traffic that sribd had suffered from recently.
He handily posted the below graph from Quantcast to quantify their actual loss, and went on to explain that they had been employing a nice tactic to increase search visibility for long tail queries:
“The site used to have a clever internal system which monitored the keywords sending natural search traffic and then added them to the page automatically to make the page seem more relevant than before and therefore get higher rankings.”
The concept of taking actual search queries that have triggered clicks to your site I found very interesting, its kind of like UGC but without requiring the surfer to actually do anything, and for most websites building up a decent position on the potentially hundreds of terms per page that ‘might’ drive traffic is phenomenally difficult unless you have some serious domain authority in your chosen subject, and lets face it, most of us don’t!
I tend to use WordPress for most of my smaller sites that I launch around keyword rich domain names, as its a simple and easy way to build out half decent sites in minutes as opposed to days, so I set about writing a plugin that would replicate exactly what scribd had turned off to monitor the results.
In a nutshell, the plugin strips the search term from the referring URL if its come from a search engine (pretty much every major SE as well) and saves it in a table, and displays the queries on the post pages of the wordpress site that a user has used to find that specific page.
The results so far have been pretty good, increasing the total number of clicks that I have received from specific long tail queries, and increasing the unique queries that have passed through hits.
Some example stats taken from one of my sites:
Before the plugin (well, mainly before the plugin, I installed it on this site on August 25th)
After the Plugin (and a week or so)
Further Stats from those time periods: (BP= Before Plugin / AP = After Plugin)
Total Visits from Organic Search: 1,382 BP / 2,627 AP
Total Unique Search Terms (organic): 176 BP / 347 AP
Increase in Organic Traffic = 90.08%
Increase in Unique Search Terms = 97.15%
I have the plugin installed on about 25 different websites at the moment, and I have seen a varying uplift in traffic to old posts on every wordpress site I have installed it on, the stats above are from a site I chose because it has had no new content added or changed and zero linkbuilding done during the period of the test (or immediately before either).
The plugin also gives you a handy control panel where you can see how what queries have triggered clicks for what pages (live stats) and you can also configure a few other parameters, such as how many queries are displayed and the format they are displayed in.
This is my first stab at an SEO plugin (or any plugin in fact) for WordPress, and if any other webmasters here that use WordPress would be interested in giving it a shot, I would love to hear your feedback!
Disclosure: within the plugin list of keywords I have an embedded link back to my new site, if you don’t want it to appear on your site then you can remove it from the source, but as noted in the documentation of the plugin, I would really appreciate it if you did link to my site if you find the plugin useful!
If you want to play about with the plugin you can download my Wordpress SEO Plugin Here (download from wordpress.org).
