The best way to get more success is to look at what has worked for you in the past and then try and do more of them. That is why I went back to the analytics data of Binaryday for the last one year to analyze the most successful posts to identify a trend in them. I define successful posts based on two criteria

1. Posts that get a lot of traffic and
2. Posts that attract links

Today’s post is about the former category i.e posts that have attracted the maximum amount of traffic. Before I discuss the secrets of these posts, it will be apt to show you the links to all these posts so that you may analyze them yourself as well.

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Identifying these posts was relatively easy. But once I had identified these posts, the next question that I had to answer was Did these posts have something in common that made them get more traffic compared to other posts. I found some really interesting ideas from this exercise.

1. All the posts started with extensive keyword research Unlike most of the posts on Binaryday, these posts were not extempore. I had written about the posts after doing a significant amount of keyword research. While I always do extensive keyword research before writing on my niche blogs, Binaryday has been one place where I share ideas that I strongly believe in and hence tend to ignore the keywords. This is a reminder to me that I have to treat keywords with more respect if I want traffic.
2. Optimized copy writing: Many people do keyword research. But most of them forget to use the keyword properly while writing the body of the post other than using it in the title tag. Some creative and optimized use of keywords and derivatives of those keywords in the body of the post goes a long way towards getting more traffic to your blog.
3. Getting some initial external link: I had built at least 3-4 external links for each of these posts. I think some external link building right after publishing a post does wonder to the ranking of the posts.
4. #1 position in the SERP: I was in for a surprise while looking at the traffic pattern of each of these pages and the exact keywords that have got them the traffic. Many of these keywords ranked for a number of keywords each. However invariably the largest amount of traffic was obtained by 3-4 word key phrases for which they ranked at the top of the SERP. Even shorter key phrases where they ranked at no.2 got less traffic. This is an awesome insight that will help me immensely in future.
5. The importance of internal linking: I have always known that internal links are important and I always build internal links for posts that I want to rank for. But I had never realized the real importance of internal links till now. However as I was checking the rank of these posts for their target keywords, I found that all of them have fallen several places down from their original position.  What has happened? Few months back this blog had been penalized by Google for bad linking and the pagerank had gone down to 0. I did not know which link created the problem since I used to link out to a large number of sites from my posts. To fix the problem, I simply wrote a simple script that changed all links within the body of the posts into nofollow. That solved the problem and Binaryday got back to a pagerank of 3. But I had converted all the inetrnal links into nofollow as well. I am confident that that is what caused all these posts to go down from their original positions.

I will talk about the posts that got the maximum links in the next post. Till then let me know what you think about these posts that have got me the maximum traffic in the last 2 months and what I may do to get them back to their #1 position.

On a serious note, what I write below is based on my experience of working with niche sites like the one above. Moreover I am not going to sell you anything/ recommend something with my affiliate link smartly cloaked, so you should pay some attention to the post.

What are keywords

Everyone thinks that he/ she knows what are keywords. I thought so. However as I continued working on niche sites, I realized that the obvious things are obvious to everyone else and hence all lucrative urls are booked and there is an insane amount of competition. That is when fell back on commonsense approach instead of all the jargons that I had picked up till then.

Keyword Research is the process of finding out the terms that users are most likely to use while looking for the product that you are selling.

• For example a USB drive is also known as thumb drive or flash drive. If your website sells USB drives, then you will be interested to know which of the three terms are used by maximum number of users, so that you can concentrate on those words.
• That was a really simplistic case of keyword research. Now ask yourself if you will like to come at the top of Google results when people search for storage device or ways to transfer files from one computer to another etc. Keyword research should help you a large list of such keywords that are being used by your prospective customers and how many of them are using them. I am yet to see any tool that will give you such data.
• Finally people do not simply type in usb drive or thumb drive into Google. You will be surprised by the sort of variations used by a large number of users. This is what is popularly referred as the long tail search.

There are three important terms that we shall focus when evaluating any keyword. These are

1. Volume of search: This is basically the number of people who use the keyword. However as we go along, we shall realize that even this basic definition has many nuances including seasonality, exact match, broad match, wrong spellings etc. We shall look at all these factors in future posts.
2. Competition level compared to our existing strength and potential. That entire sentence is in bold because of its importance. Most guru tell you to go after easy terms. However what is easy for me with a 5 year old blog, lot of experience and thousands of existing income may not be easy for someone who is setting up a blog. As you study the competition level for any keyword, put that into context of the strength of your own blog.
3. Attractiveness of keywords: This is the money making ability of the keyword and will depend on the method of monetization. Some keywords that are highly attractive to people doing affiliate marketing may not be that attractive for people depending upon adsense to monetize and vice versa. Nevertheless, always keep an eye on the money making potential of the keyword that you are studying.

Looks like my little site has developed some sort of stage fear and is refusing to move beyond the third page of google result My first thought was to abandon the site and start working on a new site. But then one of my close friends suggested that I can not earn the right to lecture others about research unless I am able to move this site to the first page.

That is why I have decided to use this post as an open challenge to myself to work on my stained glass website and get it to the top 10 for a search about stained glass supplies. I am giving myself time till the end of August to accomplish this result. Right now I intend to publish posts about other stained glass items and continue to try different methods to push it up.

I hope I will be upto the challenge. If I fail then may be I will jsut delete this post and continue to give gyaan to people about keyword research. Shameless Btw if you have got some suggestions about how I can improve the ranking, then please let me know.

What happened to your greenbar?

Most importantly, I resolved the issue with a method that can be replicated for any blog suffering from google penalty. I shall write a post about the method soon. For now I am going to celebrate with some Vodka

1. Title Tag:
   • A descriptive title tag helps search engines to understand the content better
   • Most search engines use 60 characters from the title tag.
   • Search engines may give lesser importance to keywords after a certain point – Keep main keywords to the front.
   • Some users only look at titles – If you skimp on your title tag, you’re missing out on clicks from users who only
     scan result titles on a search results page Really!! (Page 5)
   • Prefered structure is <title> Brand Name – Target Keywords </title> : Leverage the brand if you have one (Page 6)
   • Do not copy title tag from some other page. (Page 7) Show this example the next time your boss shouts for a wrong copy paste job. Even Googlers use it
2. URL Structure
   • A descriptive url structure helps search engines to understand the content better
   • It plays a part in improving user click through rate
3. Meta Description Tag
   • description meta tags and keyword meta tags don’t count in Google’s ranking  (official confirmation of what we knew) -Page 9
   • The text from meta description tag is sometimes used for result snippet. Absence of meta description tag may result in non sensical text from the page to be shown as snippet.
   • Fill your two lines – Similar to the title tag, you want to use all of the space given to you in the snippet. You’ll describe your product better to users, have the opportunity for more bolded words, and take up more real estate on the search results page Page-9
   • Missing snippet for a page is a signal that something is wrong like google bot being denied access through robots.txt
4. Sitelinks
   • Webmasters can improve the chances of getting a sitelink by using 1. Hierarchical site structure, 2. using descriptive anchor text for internal links and 3. avoiding deep nesting of content behind many subdirectories. (p-13)
   • Google’s algorithm for creating sitelinks is not perfect. You should block unappealing sitelinks to get better sitelinks (p-15)
   • Google chooses popular and relevant content as sitelink (p-16)
5. Consolidating link juice
   • Either 301 redirect or canonical tag can be used to consolidate link juice from different pages showing the same content.  In the entire discussion about duplicate content, the emphasis is on split of link juice and not any duplicate content penalty. Is there a hint there? (p-19)
     
   • 301 redirect will not help if the page is blocked through robots.txt (p-19)
   • Don’t use 302s when 301s would be more appropriate (p-27) 302 redirect does not consolidate link juice.
   • 301 to the canonical or use the rel=”canonical” link element. Hopefully dobuts about effectiveness of rel=”canonical” tag will be removed now. (p-30)
6. Heading Tag Use
   • Use of heading tag helps search engines to understand your content better (p-34)
   • Smart use of CSS to get the same effect will not help (p-48)
   • H1 tags are better than H3 (p-48)
7. Images
   • Link images to the canonical destination pages to consolidate internal link juice (p-39)
   • Appropriate ALT text for linked images help search engines learn about target page and the image itself (p-42)
   • the alt text of images is  treated as anchor text by search engines (p-43)
8. Internal Anchor Text
   • Use of descriptive anchor text for internal pages helps (p-45)

Please let me know about any point that I might have missed or wrongly interpreted.

Please help this content reach more people with a tweet/sphinn or any other sharing medium of your choice, if you liked it.

To understand why you need to keep track of your pagerank, read my article 5 reasons why Toolbar Pagerank is still important.

The following posts on binaryday will help you get backlinks and hence increase your pagerank

1. Beginners guide to building free backlinks
2. Why you need to know what type of backlink your blog needs
3. 60 dofollow blogs
4. 6 websites to get your indian startup profiled

I logged into google webmaster tools and went straight to the crawl stats page. Here is a screenshot of the crawl stat page that confirmed my fear that google has stopped crawling my pages. From an average of 200 pages per day, Google had stopped crawling my pages all together!!!

My next stop was the sitemaps section of google webmaster tool. The sitemap for used mobiles site was showing some stupid error i.e robots.txt unreachable. I never put up a robots.txt file on my website out of my love for GoogleBot. It has always worked fine. What is this new issue??

A quick search on google led me to this file. This is a google webmaster help file.I found the problem at the bottom of the page. It is OK to not have a robots.txt on your site if an attempt to access robots.txt results in a 404 error. However if you do not have a robots.txt file and the server is giving some other error status then google does not crawl your site at all !!!

I have just added a new robots.txt to the site and google has started to access the files. Hope everything will get back to normal soon. This has been one of the stupidest mistakes that I have done in the last 5-6 years. I am confident of going past it in future though.

1. http://www.killerstartups.com/(6)
2. http://headstart.in/(5)
3.  http://www.pluggd.in/ (5)
4. http://www.webyantra.net/ (5)
5. http://www.yourstory.in (4)
6. Startups.in (3)

The numbers in bracket represent the pagerank of the website. That is one PR6, 3 PR5 and 1 PR4 and PR3 links each. No website can get a better start in less than 1 week work.

Exact match domain name

Go to google.co.in and try the keyword “used mobiles”. Around the 6-7 result you will find usedmobiles.com. Click on the link and visit the site!!!!!! Google is stupis enough to think that a parked domain is more relevant than my website that has been linked from at least 4-5 established high trust blogs and websites. The only virtue of usedmobiles.com is the fact that it has an exact matching domain name. Do you need any more proof??

TLD of domain

Now go to google.co.in and try the keyword “second hand mobiles”. The second result is mobile4sale.in. contacthello is at 5-6 position. I have moved down from the 3rd position in the last few days. Sucks To be fair mobiles4sale.in is a really good site. However the more I research, the more convnced I am that a major reason of their ranking is their TLD which is .in.

Conclusion

Having spent a good amount of effort in my existing website, I do not want to move to a completely new website. I will fight back inspite of these handicaps. However if you are yet to book your domain name, then take my advice and book a domain with keywords in it and with a TLD specific to the country that you are targetting.