Friday, October 20, 2006
Funny Bugbear Picture Traffic
Frank's also had time to get back to his latest bugbear. He's growing gradually obsessed by the idea that we should now start targeting the search term 'funny pictures'. His argument seems to be bolstered by the fact that even though he's only had one post mentioning the term, it has reached no.6 in our search term charts. Bet you didn't even know we have search term charts. Now that would seem all very good and well but he fails to mention that just two places below, and on the strength of one post mentioning, we have 'legend rte' and just a few below that we have 'nigger cartoons'. In fact, if we go down through the list we'll find it is cluttered with loads of useless, irrelevent terms. Not to complain, that's what the blogs are for - a sort of scatter-gun approach to traffic building - but does it mean we should start focussing in on any of them? Of course, Frank will argue that funny pictures is less irrelevent and he's right. But is it relevent enough to become such a focus for us? I don't think so. I'm absolutely certain that if we targetted it, we'd get a pretty nifty boost in traffic. I've no doubts about. What I do doubt is the quality of that traffic. Are people searching for funny pictures really looking for funny cartoons? I don't think so. It might be something handy that brings in some incidental traffic but I have a sneaking suspicion it might just bring in some really crap traffic too - people looking for funny pictures of half-naked ladies puking finding themselves faced with strange puns can react with some hostility. I'm keen to get switched over to Wordpress and explore what we can achieve with del.icio.us or stumbleupon etc etc. Farting around with more google search terms just seems like a waste of the precious time that Frank is so keen to point out he has very little of. All in all, I think that while search engine traffic is your lifeblood if you run a site for a youth hostel in Galway after two years of cartoons, it's something we should be growing less dependent on.
6 Comments:
two points though:
1. check how many people actually search for 'rte legend' as against how many people search for 'funny pictures'.
2. compare and contrast the amount of time it takes to switch over to wordpress (in a meaningful way) as against the time it took me to write two posts containing the term 'funny pictures'
Now, if we could get someone to sponsor our move to wordpress and actually pay for the time it would take... any takers...?
I take your points too, but I'd be confident a subset of the large numbers of people searching for funny pictures would appreciate our stuff...
Yes, i was being a little facetious
Why are we comparing the changeover to wordpress to you writing a couple of posts on funny pictures? I have no issue with doing the odd post. I was comparing it to running a concerted SEO campaign for the new term. And if you do compare the two, let's take into account the extra benefits of the changeover.
You're not the only one who puts time into the site.
The thing is I don't agree. I don't that subset is big enough to warrant our attention. I don't think that continuously concentrating our efforts on search engines is the best use of your limited time.
Anyway, I don't know why you're arguing with me. If you're going to do it, you're going to do it. I'm hardly going to come smashing through the window to form a human shield in front of the keyboard.
Arguing is what we do best. We should do it over coffee.
But how will that help our search engine rankings. Last time I was in a cafe, I didn't see any googlebot running through.
Wordpress me the fuck up. I'll pay you to dick around with Wordpress on clamnuts.com and then with your knowledge base you can shift some paradigms. I want to group my posts into categories as presently its all over the place.
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