How do I get lots of hits for my blog post?

What do you notice? Ok, the first thing is that only the titles are shown. That's one clue!

Yes, some of the blog posts are pretty old now, and that's one of the things to remember. Older content on the web doesn't disappear, and a well-written blog post that links to you can be an assett for a long time.

However, the first and possibly most important clue is in the title. All have keywords or combinations of keywords that people search for. "Tiger Woods Sport Psychology" for example. "Cheerleader Uniforms" (a great example of hooking people in with a potentially more provocative title!), "Olympic Sponsorship" or "Golf Ball Design" for example. These are all searched for and we see the evidence on a daily basis (through our stats).

Let's look at one of these - Tiger Woods and Sport Psychology. Why does this work? Well, there are loads of hits out there to be gained for the term "Tiger Woods" (in particular) or the term "Sport Psychology" but you are never that likely to get to the top of search engine rankings for either term alone using a blog post (as good as they are for getting noticed). However, the intersection of these terms provides an opportunity to get to the top of the rankings for a less competitive but still well-searched term. Let's look at the figures (from Google's keyword tool):

Search term                                   Competition                     Global Monthly Search Volume

Sport Psychology                           Very High                           49, 500
Tiger Woods                                   Very High                          2, 240, 000
Tiger Woods Psychology             Low                                    140
Tiger Woods Sport Psychology   Very low                            Not enough data

(This ignores the additional term "mental toughnes" that's in the title, but it doesn't change much).

Interesting. Search volumes are low, but importantly so too is competition. At the time of writing, the blog was approaching 3800 views. So we know that "low" volumes can add up, if you're top of the rankings. On the other hand, unless you are a massive player and your site is highly relevant to Tiger Woods (for example his own site) you are not even going to get a minute share of the 2 million monthly searches that Tiger gets.

Important lesson: Distribution of search hits is unequal and skewed almost totally to page 1 rankings (whatever the search engines, but obviously Google is the biggest at present). So getting to the top of page 1 for a relatively obscure term which is relevant to your target market is an effective strategy.

How do you exploit this phenomenon (which is the 'long tail' that Chris Anderson wrote about)?

Well, here's one view of the Top Ten Positive Search Engine Factors (from SEOmoz.org):

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
2. Anchor Text of Inbound Link
3. Global Link Popularity of Site
4. Age of Site
5. Link Popularity within the Site's Internal Link Structure
6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links
7. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
8. Keyword Use in Body Text
9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
10. Rate of New Inbound Links to Site

Note number 1 - keyword use in title tag. That's one you can control. What else can you control?

Well, you can certainly control #8 - Keyword use in body text (but don't "stuff" it with keywords - it should be readable! and don't forget to add 'tags') and you can influence #3 by sharing your posts or RSS feed on boomarking sites or feed aggregators. Much of the rest is our job and iStadia is proving to be an effective platform (while we're always strivign to improve it).

Other important considerations are:
- One blog post isn't going to change your business, but a strategy that incorporates regular blogging can
- You should not be penalised for posting on your own site and on iStadia. if you are concerned about this, a few changes to the wording of title and text will help (but the WHOLE page including menus is considered 'content' when a page is assessed as duplicate or not). This advice can be subject to change (and debate).
- Photos with ALT and TITLE tages that contain your keywords are very effective at driving traffic through image searches. Indeed, the Michael Jordan and Rugby posts in our list derived most of their hits from image searches.
- Likewise, content that includes both text and video can attract more traffic
- Oh, and questions (as titles) can help, especially if they are questions that you might expect a potential customer or client to ask.

Happy blogging!