Analytics study of a new blog (with graphic!)

[Rank Higher Make Money]

I have a newish blog website. Domain purchased back in August 2010. I haven't done too much with it other than sporadically posting to it and some link building, which has included blog commenting and forum posts. The forum and blog comments have been very limited though. Most of the SEO done for the site has been on-page.

Anyway I thought I would share the analytics traffic stats for anyone that might find it useful or interesting. I think there is one obvious lesson to take away from it - the message is to keep content fresh (and unique) if you have a blog! Google seems to like that.

So here's the graphic:



Like it says, green arrows all point to when I posted something to the blog. The red arrow is when Panda first hit.

I'm #3 for my target keyword for this site, behind #2 wikipedia, and #1 a well-established community site for this niche. It's an exact match .net domain and I feel that I could overtake the #1 spot if I put more effort into it. The truth is, I have bigger fish to fry lately, and this site could end up being more effort than it's worth.

Still, I like to think of it as a seed that has been planted, and maybe in the future I can grow it into something more.

For now, I think that due to my sporadic posting, the analytics stats have a very revealing message. The message is that if you have a blog, keep posting fresh, unique content! As you can see, when I wasn't posting content, the traffic dropped. Traffic dropped because I lost rankings. When I do take the time to post to the blog, the rankings come back and so does the traffic.

I have put very little effort into this, outside of standard wordpress SEO stuff. Permalinks are /%category%/%postname%/ ... optimized title tags, headers and meta descriptions. I haven't checked the number of external backlinks but it can't be more than 30.

Anyway, it's interesting that after Panda first rolled out late January, the site plummeted. Not only had I stopped posting, but Google's update also destroyed the rankings. But wouldn't you know it, as soon as I put some effort into posting again, the site rolled right back up to #3, where it sits currently.

Hope this is useful for anyone out there!