If you did a Google search on 31 Jan 2009 between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST, you likely saw the message “This site may harm your computer” on every site of the search result. This was clearly an error which was confirmed by Google. It was caused by a human error which mistakenly released a wrong file to their production server.
Why I am mentioning this particular incident? The reason is I took the advantage of this incident and managed to get 200+ unique visitors from Google 20 ~ 30 minutes after the incident happened. The amount of traffic is consider small for some larger blog. But for my blog, the traffic was large enough as a spike considering it is a relatively new blog with 1 month old.
On that day, while I was twittering as usual, I noticed something happened to Google via twitterscoop. I immediately check out the Google search engine and confirmed the issue. So quickly I wrote a blog post about this incident and published it within 5 minutes. You can check out my original post here - Google May Harm You Computer. My intention was to experiment if I could drive traffic to my website from Google within very short period of time.
10 minutes after publishing, Google crawled and indexed my blog post. I checked my visitor tracking report WordPress plugin and found that traffic started flowing in. That’s cool, my experiment worked.
Within next 1 to 2 hours, I got 200+ unique visitors coming from Google itself with various search keywords. From this experiment, I have learned a few lessons which I would like to share with you.
Lesson #1: Make Google Trust Your Website
Google loves content. In order to get indexed and crawled by Google automatically, all you need is trust. You need to make Google trust your website content. There are a few elements in writing content that are trustworthy.
- First you need to write original content. Duplicated content will be penalized by Google.
- Frequent update is necessary for your website, preferably daily. If you can’t make it, at least 3 to 4 times a week.
- You need to publish your posts according to a fixed schedule.
By doing all of these, you can quickly establish a good relationship Google. Eventually Google will send its crawler to your website periodically at specific time.
Lesson #2: Adjust Strategy With Realtime Analytics
Google Analytics is the most powerful free tool available for us to analyze our visitors. The biggest disadvantage is Google does not provide realtime data. You might want to do some traffic analysis after hitting publish button and adjust your strategy and tactics accordingly.
You can try Yahoo Analytics or WassUp WordPress plugin.
Lesson #3: Optimize Your Web Page For Search Engines
Get your web pages indexed in Google is the first step, the second step is to get high ranking in search engine result page. Search engine optimization is a common approach to optimize your web pages to achieve high rankings. With high rankings in search engines, you are able to enjoy free long-term natural traffic consistently.
Longtail keywords usually contain 3 or more words and it is easier to rank well in search engines. Short keywords are competitive and very hard to get high ranking in Google as you need an established site and more baclinks. In my experiment, I have chosen ‘google harm your computer’ as my longtail keywords instead of choosing ‘google error’.
My page has been ranked in page 1 of Google search result for the first few hours and the rankings gradually dropped until page 4 now. I didn’t go out and look for backlinks after publishing. The lesson is you need to constantly look for backlinks to prevent your competitors overtake you.
Lesson #4: Learn Speedwriting
Speedwriting is necessary especially when you are writing realtime news. If you are able to produce the content within very short period of time after the event, then you are ahead of your competitors and you could take the advantage of it.
In my experiement, if I didn’t produce the content fast enough, then I might not be able to get so many traffic because the news will lose focus as the time goes by.
Lesson #5: Use Twitter To Drive Traffic
Besides getting traffic from Google, I did get some traffic from my Twitter followers and Twitter search. Twitter has growth a lot since last year. Many people uses Twitter to source for quality content. Twitter search is also widely used and might be able to replace Google. There are quite a number of blog posts discussing about this topic. No matter what is the result, Twitter is able to generate tons of traffic within the first few hours after you tweet your blog post. In addition, with the support of re-tweet, you can reach a large number of people even if they not following you.
With the use of Twitter or other social networking platforms, you can better connect and communicate with your readers because of their nature. Problogger is one of the very successful blogger in deploying Twitter.
Lesson #6: Produce Quality Content To Have Better Conversion Rate
Quality content is the key to convert visitors into subscribers and sales. In my experiment, the quality of my post is not that good as it does not provide much useful information. So the conversion rate was really poor for that day.
Of course, you need to explicitely ask for subscriber and sales if you expect people to do so. Remember do not do it overly.
