SEO Techniques that work

I must be doing something right, as last month had the highest numbers of both Unique Visitors and Visits [same person with more than one visit].

In addition to adding content and a few dozen new pages over the last few months, I have also been doing Search Engine Optimization [SEO].

As I've indicated in previous posts the SEO techniques primarily include adding 'alt' tags to pic files and 'title' tags to internal links. Many pages already had the html tags, but many pages did not have the enhancement, with some pages only having part of them. I've been making these enhancements over the last six months.

So my advice is to insure that every pic file has an 'alt' tag that describes what the picture is. In many cases a pic file also has a 'title' tag which describes the picture in greater detail. At the same time any page-to-page link also gets a 'title' tag, if it didn't already have one.

Now you could say that the increase in visits is due to content additions, or from adding new pages. However I would disagree, because although I have been adding a lot of new content, the per page content added is small. Or, much of the content added over the last six months is spread out over several hundred pages.

Secondly, the amount of new pages added over that time frame is also small, say around 61 pages in six months. Now you could say that was a great many additions to the site, but I'll try to indicate why it's not.

First off , any new page added last month [and December too] are still in the Google sand box and is irrelevant [Trimmer Resistor; random example]. Also any page added last month may not have even been completely spider-ed. So we'll forget about the 22 most recent page additions. November saw a lot of Component Package additions, pages holding gif files with little or no text ~ another 17 pages. October had a few 'How-To' additions which receive no hits to speak of ~ 8 pages. Same thing with September, just a few BJT Outline drawings which will receive zero visits ~ 4 pages. Now we're back to August, which is about the time frame that should start to matter, but again a few 'How-To' additions ~ 3 pages.

So I would discount 54 of the last 61 new pages as not adding anything to the site yet [really all of them]. I always assume 15 to 30 days before Google spiders a page. Than another 30 days before Google reads the page completely, still another 3 months after that before a page gets a Page Rank [if at all]. I'm not saying these pages aren't getting any page views just that the few dozen page views they are getting wouldn't show up as a change on the graph.

I contend that the increase in visits is due almost entirely from optimizing the pages for the search engines. Really, I've been adding pages to the site for years and I don't see any sustained increase in visits ~ but I do now. Search Engine Optimization has been the biggest change I've been making to the greatest number of pages over the last few months. The last few months are the highest for the site ever, not counting December [always a low month].

Now these 'alt' or 'title' tags also help site visitors, either by showing text if the gif doesn't come in or by providing detail if they hover over a link ~ it's win-win.

Now there is always one more point some would could make about the increase in page visits. That is the Google computer pushed this site up near the top of the search listing while another site moved to the second page. That argument could work for one month, but not for the last four months. As Google re-orders their listing every month. More importantly, we're talking about 1,600 individual pages, Google didn't push all of them to the first page!

Finally my page on Google Sites [Thermal Impedance ~ random page] is bringing in about 60 people/month, 73% of which are new to the site, word of mouth traffic? Googl Knol is bringing in yet another 60 visits per month at 57% new visitors [Component Derating ~ just a random page]. However neither of those referrals would seem to add up to the 10,000 additional visits which occurred last month, but it doesn't hurt either.

Right, we're trying to explain 20,000 new visitors, and the only thing I can say other then it is due to the SEO changes is that some how the few hundred visitors due to page additions or referrals adds into the thousands ~ I don't think so. Add the html TAGs.....