It’s now been 2 months since I wrote my first ever WordPress plug-in and I’m finally ready to reveal some results. The reason I’ve waited so long was that I wanted to make sure that any changes that I was seeing were long term and not just day to day fluctuations in search traffic. If you look below you can see a week-by-week traffic chart of the organic search traffic that Google has been sending me since I first implemented the plug-in (including the current part week):-
As you can see it has definitely had a positive affect on the amount of traffic Google is sending me. The same is also true of the other search major search engines but because the numbers are lower there tends to be more fluctuation. Just to make sure that the results weren’t limited to what I write about on here I also installed the plug-in on 2 other blogs – again because they get less traffic the chart doesn’t look as nicely curved but the overall number are actually much better. I’m averaging a 75% increase in organic traffic on the blogs which use the plug-in.
If you look at the time line the first real effect it had was to level of my search traffic. Up until that point my traffic has been spiking up and down depending on how often I posted and I’m guessing, what I posted about. It had been like that for 12 months. Once the deep indexing from the search engines kicks in the plug-in starts to have some real effect and my rankings and traffic starts to increase. It’s also worth noting that during this time my home page Page Rank decreased, but I’ve now got many more pages indexed and carrying their own page rank (if that’s what floats your boat). Overall I’d call it a success. More importantly a totally white hat success at that.
So now the question is, what is this plug-in worth TO YOU? $5, $25, $100? Just kidding. Because it’s a little bit rough around the edges ( all be it effective) I’m going to give it away for free. I’m in the process of building a resources page and I’ll chuck it on that. The only thing that I’d ask is that people Stumble/Digg/Tweet it or whatever the hell else people do these days. I will try and have the resources page up this afternoon so stay tuned.
(Here’s another chart over the same period, this time Google traffic for a blog in the uber competitive Holiday market)
6 Responses to “My Plug-In For Improving Search Traffic”
Paul B
May 4, 2009
The idea is simple. When a post goes of your home page it tends to get forgotten – certainly in the SERPS. The best way of countering this is with your internal linking, but that involves you remembering your old posts when you write your new posts. All the plugin does is automatically insert links to your existing posts depending on a number of key-phrases that you select. So not only are you getting a more thourough internal linking web but you’re also getting some diversity with the link text being used (instead of just the post title). All my traffic improvements have been because older posts are now suddenly ranking better (take a look at my popular posts on the side, that is based on visitor numbers)
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