SEO Tycoon

**ForrestCroce** · 09-18-2007, 01:23 AM

So far this month, and my host doesn't let me refresh awstats at will, so this is almost a day old, but I've had:

1,200 referrals from Google
3,000 from Google Images
250 from Yahoo
100 from MSN and Live combined
50 from the rest of the search engines
1,026 unique search phrases.

There are a handful of big ones showing up in my logs, and then pages and pages of long tail. A lot of them are different ways of describing the same concepts, there are different spellings - lens vs lense, or national forrest. Plenty in here that I wouldn't have thought to optimize for, and probably still won't, but it's a treasure trove of ideas.

Moral of the story: don't optimize around just one or a couple of phrases. Writing naturally pays off in the long term.

**ADAM Web Design** · 09-18-2007, 01:59 AM

Couldn't have happened to a better guy, Forrest. Very well done. You deserve every bit of this.

Are you talking about your blog, which is effectively considered a separate site and would have separate stats, or your main site?

**ForrestCroce** · 09-18-2007, 02:26 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ADAM Web Design

Couldn't have happened to a better guy, Forrest. Very well done. You deserve every bit of this.

I take it that's good in terms of search traffic, then? I'm happy that it's going up month over month, but I'm really shocked at how many search phrases there are compared to searches overall.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ADAM Web Design

Are you talking about your blog, which is effectively considered a separate site and would have separate stats, or your main site?

That's the main site; the blog is a lot smaller in terms of traffic, but for good reason. I finally pushed the first post off the main page... I'd rather put out fewer good posts than a lot of bad ones, but until the site has more depth and breadth I can't hope for it to pull that much traffic. People love the Google Maps, though. I just need to do more traveling, ideally up over the border.

Ironically, with the blog on its own subdomain, it doesn't show up as a referrer in awstats. In Analytics I can see plenty of people clicking from it to the main site, so it's not a lack of data.

**gringo** · 09-18-2007, 04:29 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ForrestCroce

Moral of the story: don't optimize around just one or a couple of phrases. Writing naturally pays off in the long term.

I couldn't agree more. I've found that even though I ignore keyword research completely, I get a surprising amount of traffic.

That's a lot of unique search phrases! For the sake of comparison Google Analytics says searchers used 760 different search phrases to find one of my sites. It's interesting to see how other people are faring, trafficwise - thanks for sharing

**Learning Newbie** · 09-18-2007, 01:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ForrestCroce

I take it that's good in terms of search traffic, then? I'm happy that it's going up month over month, but I'm really shocked at how many search phrases there are compared to searches overall.

Shut up and take the complement!

**ForrestCroce** · 10-03-2007, 03:02 AM

Now that the month is closed, and since Gringo pointed to this thread answering a question in another one, here's the total for September 2007, at least for the major engines:

Google Images - 6,384
Google - 2,252
Yahoo - 445
Windows Live - 110
MSN - 95
AOL - 77

And so on.

**gringo** · 10-03-2007, 04:44 AM

That's a lot of referrals from Google Images, Forrest.

Only because you said in the other thread you had nothing to compare against, these are mine for September:

Google - 4,398
Live - 164
MSN - 126
AOL - 34
Unique Phrases - 1,239