Experimentation and Off Topic Posts

By mgray
In SEO  

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My buddy Nick has a golden rule of blogging, it’s called the 80/20 rule. If you’ve never read that post you certainly should, but in a nutshell it says 80% of your posts should be about your “core topic” and 20% of your posts can be off topic or “cat posts”. I have to say it’s really excellent advice although it’s sometimes a bit difficult to keep up with.

Now when I started this blog it was just me blathering about nonsense with no rhyme or reason. In fact the whole thing was just a great big experiment. However I posted about an entertainment type news story, got picked up in the yahoo buzz report and got my first really big burst of traffic. So being the curious chap that I am I tried to repeat the experiment. Didn’t work the first few times, but I was persistent, and I scored another big hit when some celebrity I blogged about died when mixing drugs and alcohol. So I tried a few more times using tactics like predictive seo and mad-libs seo and was getting some decent traffic. However I had this big blog of disconnected subjects when I was really trying to develop a search related blog, so I toned things down and tried to stay more on topic.

However one of the main purposes of this blog was to try and experiment with new stuff, and that’s never going to change. Now every so often you’ll see me post about something other than search, and when you do 90% of the time I’m experimenting trying to rank for something. Some folks have caught on and see the experiments for what they are, which is good.

For example when I blogged about the Mcdonald’s Pirates of the Caribbean Game I was genuinely annoyed at whole thing. While the post took less than 15 minutes to write, it took me about half an hour to get the title right. My goal was to rank for the phrase, hope some McDonalds big wig would see the post email me and bribe compensate me with some groovy pirate swag. While no email came, what came instead was traffic, and lots of it, that page had over 5000 page views in July. My Danika Patrick page while less successful has still brought in close to 1600 page views. So while it may look like an off-topic post, if it’s keyword related chances are it’s much more likely to be a public experiment.

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