One of the things that has been the most fascinating part of running a magazine-style site is watching how each of the individual channels are growing in such vastly different ways. Momsational gets most of its traffic from contest aggregation sites. Freelance Parent is getting a lot of traffic from StumbleUpon, because they put out a lot of popular articles on writing. And the Kids’ Activities blog is going gangbusters thanks to the search engines.
I’d like to talk a little bit about what Shannon is doing right on the Seasonal Kids’ Activities Blog, because yesterday she got more traffic to her blog than I did on mine, by over 200%. She got no big Stumble from StumbleUpon, no big link from another blogger : nearly ALL her traffic came from search engines yesterday, and no one single keyword or keyphrase sent her more than 9 visitors.
So How Did Shannon Kick eMom’s Butt Yesterday?
She Takes Advantage of Seasonal Searches
It was the day before Valentine’s Day, and searches for Valentine’s Day treats, activities, recipes, etc. peaked yesterday. Maybe “skyrocketed” is a better word than “peaked”. After the holiday her traffic will slump a bit until St. Patrick’s Day comes around.
She is Listening to Her Audience
Although people rarely comment on Shannon’s blog, she knows what they like by analyzing the way they find her site. She has a rich keyword history to review in Google Analytics at this point, and she knows what people are looking for. So she gives it to them.
She Has Done a Lot of Keyword Research
What Shannon lacks in her own data she is finding in keyword tools like this one from Aaron Wall. She’s taken the time to find out what words other people use to search and is making sure she uses their language in her post titles and articles.
She is Using Proper Alt Tags on her Images
By naming her images with keywords and using keywords in image ‘alt’ tags, Shannon’s referrals from Google Image Search are on the rise, and it’s also helping her to rank better overall
She is Developing Natural Relevant Links from Quality Related Sites
There aren’t a ton of Kids’ Activity blogs out there, so there aren’t a million places she can go to network. But by getting to know Char over at Printables4Kids and even linking from her own personal bog, she has been able to make a huge difference in her traffic this Valentine’s Day compared to past holidays like Christmas and Halloween
She is Working on Creating Community Outside of Her Blog
While she hasn’t seen a ton of traffic from her efforts yet, she’s taken her content on the road so to speak when she set up a group on Flickr to share photos of kids’ projects with other parents. It’s been a great way for her to both get more exposure for her blog and also contribute great content to the parenting community outside of our site.
I’d Also Like to Highlight What Shannon ISN’T Doing
She Isn’t Submitting Her Own Articles to StumbleUpon or Other Social Media Sites
Although there are mixed feelings about the rights and wrongs of self-submission, we prefer to let the community decide what gets popular on the social media sites. Skellie can tell you how to make sure your stuff gets stumbled tamper-free. 
She Isn’t Spamming Forums with Links
Although Shannon is finding forums and communities to join, she’s only mentioning her site when it comes up in conversation, or when someone asks for the information. I think this is a really, really important point, and exemplifies best practices when setting out to do self-promotion in online communities.
She Isn’t Leaving Comments on Blogs Just to Promote Herself
I’m a huge advocate of commenting as a way to promote yourself. I also advocate only adding to the conversation and not spamming other bloggers. Interestingly, when I look through Shannon’s referring sites, I don’t see any traffic of substance coming from her commenting activity. I’d actually recommend she does this a little more come Easter time. 
She Isn’t Slacking
Usually our authors write about 3-4 posts a week. In preparation for Valentine’s Day, she posted a lot more frequently leading up to the holiday, and wrote a lot of posts much earlier than she did for previous holidays. That two week lead time and updating her content at a rapid pace made a HUGE difference in increasing her traffic.
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I get the majority of my traffic from Google, so OF COURSE I wrote a post about an easy idea for homemade valentines. I did the same at Christmas and took advantage of what I knew people would be searching for. On the one hand, I’m bummed that I have only a handful of regular readers and commenters (about 30). However, I know I must be doing something right - my stats keep climbing even though my core readership stays about the same. (I’m averaging about 200 now). I just wish those people who find me through Google would stick around.
I am guilting of Sk*rting my own article about Bloggers for Locks of Love (my first time EVER), only because I think it’s an important topic. I have never used Digg or StumbleUpon before. I don’t see the harm, as long as you don’t make it a habit.
Lis Garrett’s last blog post..Bloggers for Locks of Love
I agree that it’s ok to submit your own stuff if it is rarely. I used to do it a lot more in the past myself. But I have always submitted other people’s things more than my own, which makes a difference, I believe.
But at this point, a lot of the articles on the site get stumbled on their own anyway. So we don’t really have to decide whether to submit our own stuff anymore or not. Makes me happy to know that all of the authors here are continually writing great stuff.
I don’t agree when you say these tatics are not spamming the search engines. Carefully studying the keywords people use to find your site in the search engines and then using them in your articles, keywords, alt tags etc… is spamming as it is done with the idea getting as many pages indexed as possible. It does work, if you carefully chose your title place a few phrase between h2 tags not only I have received high rankings for those keywords but I have even some double listings. The keywords I targeted bring me between 10 and 20 visitors a day.
If content is king people would refer a site and there would be no need of search engines. Popularity counts. People who lost PR but had traffic did not lose income.
Traffic is king no matter where it comes from.
Make Money Online | David Elefant’s last blog post..Sitemaps Why You Need Two
You have done it again. You have given us some really great content to really read and think about. Thanks.
Melissa Ingold’s last blog post..How to Write Other Web Pages – Web 2.0 Style
Great post Wendy! I think site owners can get so caught up in the allure of SEO and key word writing that they forget something that is just good common sense: write well and they will read it.
Laura’s last blog post..Do You Need A College Degree to Work At Home?
Keywords are very important in the beginning to increase the number of search hits a blog gets. Is it spamming? Fine point. I think that as long as the keywords are an honest part of the content then it’s OK. In an ideal world perhaps we would have a human referral search engine. At the moment we have Google so we need keywords.
Cookiemouse’s last blog post..Hipo Hyfryd…a vegan Welsh Valentine