Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Science, Art or just Guesswork?

The 1 family. friendly. food. traffic from search engines was 12 visits in July, 22 in August, 45 in September, and 303 in October. My estimate for November 2008 was 485 visits coming from search engines. In that post I wrote "In November, I expect a 60% increase in search engine traffic due to more posts (and therefore more hits), better rankings, and adding the blog to Live Search and Yahoo! Search."

With 4 days left till the end of November, we are trending to have... drum roll... an amazing 102 visits. Yes, that's not a typo - it is a third of the October value, and less than a quarter of my November estimate. On the bright side, it is still more than July, August and September combined. Should I be worried? Glancing through the first chapter of ProBlogger's book, I've seen that he had a similar issue when he got started.

I have spent a lot of time this month, tracking the results almost daily, reading about search engine optimization (SEO) and trying to figure out what is going on.

My main conclusion so far is that while SEO consultants try to paint SEO as an art more than a science (and in the process ask for a lot of money to optimize your site for search engines), it is still more guesswork than art. It is probably were medicine was 150 years ago. We know of some rough correlations between certain actions and how it might impact search engine traffic, but it is not yet possible to accurately predict the results.

I think that there is a huge business potential here (I'm giving it away for free, but will be happy to talk if someone is interested). The difficulty of accurately predicting results stems from the fact that many factors are involved:

• The overall search traffic might be down because of various factors such as the current recession.
• The traffic for the specific web site type or industry might change seasonally or because of other factors unrelated to my specific site.
• The number and quality of incoming links to a site affect its ranking.
• The changing site structure affects the search engine's ability to effectively crawl and index it.
• The changing site content will affect how various keywords are deemed relevant by the search engines.
• Periodical changes in search engines' algorithms will impact the ranking as well.
• The title and description of the site's pages will impact the likeliness of users to click on the page in the search results.
• Paid ads to the site are of course affected by the marketing campaign budget and settings.
• And the list goes one and on...

The 3 major search engines provide very similar tools to web masters to promote their web sites. They have some web master tools allowing some basic data (e.g. is the site in the index and when it was last crawled), but very little reasons. They have analytics which track usage of the site, but again no tools to understand why that is the traffic or to model who it will change. The best tools are related to ads (which makes some sense since that is where they get all the money from) which allow some better modeling (e.g. some historic data about keywords) but it is limited to paid ads and not good enough in my opinion.

Business potential: I think that if one of the 3 bug search engines (or some third party) would create a tool allowing people to model how various changes will impact their search traffic, it would be a huge differentiator (and will allow them to sell more ads indirectly). All the data I have listed in the bullets above exists or can be gathered by the search engines. This is data that is currently underutilized. Probably in 5-10 years we'll get there. Too bad...

So what happened?

Anyway - enough with day dreaming. Let's see what actually happened to 1 family. friendly. food. First, the data (click to enlarge, the y axis is hits per week):

We started October with about 8 hits per day, it went up to a peak of about 12 per day towards the end of October. And then it fell back to 2 hits per day by mid November, with a slight increase in the past few days.

The main thing I can attribute this change to is the fact that we got a new domain name at the end of October, and redirected the traffic from the old address (wflavors.blogspot.com) to the new domain (http://www.familyfriendlyfood.com/). My assumption from trying to use the Google web master tools and trying to search for the site in Google is that it took them much less time to figure out that the old address is just a redirect and remove it, then it took them to add the new site. Hopefully the increase in traffic in the past few days will continue and get back to the old levels. One option (that I haven't seen mentioned in the SEO articles I have read) is that their search ranking algorithm takes into account the age of the site (discounting new sites), and will gradually increase the ranking. If that's the case, then it is just a matter of waiting. Note that I did see that the site was crawled starting in late October, so Google knew about it immediately after it went online.

As you can see, there is a lot of guesswork involved (more below). I have done a bunch of other things to improve the search engine traffic. Here is the list:

I have added the site to Live Search and Yahoo! Search in September. We had the first hits from Live Search and Yahoo! Search in Mid November, and 3 more hits since. Still negligible compared to Google Search, and it took Microsoft and Yahoo many months to catch up (the site has been live since July), but it is progress.

I have created several landing pages on the site (outside of the blog) to cover specific topics. The idea was that each such page will talk about a certain subject that is relevant to the site, and thus have a certain concentration of keywords increasing the likelihood to be found relevant by a search to those keywords (and also redirects to relevant pages on this topic). There is an Index page, a page about Weekly Menu Plans, a page about Cookbook Reviews, and a page about Kids and Food and so on. It is still a work in progress. So far it hasn't been successful (only 1 hit to those pages in November), but I have only seen Google pick up and index those pages a few days ago, so we'll see how it will go in November.

I have add a meta description tag to all the above pages. That should help drive traffic and cause people to click on the links if they are in the search results. The first few pages that I have created didn't have this tag, and Google indexed them with its default description. The newer pages which I have created with the description have it in the Google search results (to see all the search results, use this link). It has been almost a month since and Google has not updated the description for the older pages. I hope it will do it soon.

I have also added the blog to a couple of directories (blogged.com and bloggapedia.com) and submitted to a few others, although it is not at all clear if this influenced the search results in a any way (click this link for a list of sites linking to 1 family. friendly. food., the directories don't appear there).

Bottom line - I plan to read and learn more about this topic, and continue to do some (educated) guesses to improve search engine traffic. Hopefully, it will get to a point when it is closer to a science.

October 2008 Results

October was by far the best month for 1. Family. Friendly. Food. so far, with the number of visits going up 483% month over month to 1825 visits. There were 1480 unique visitors (up 492% from 250 in September). In November, I expect the number of visits to go up 50% to about 2750 (see detailed analysis below).

Here is the week by week change in number of visits since July (click on the image for more details).



The income was still $0.00, with no clicks on ads. Currently there are no ads in the web site itself, only in searches.

Below you will find the distribution of visits by category, a quick overview of the status in each category, and the expected number of visits in November.

Search. This is traffic coming from search engines. The number of visits from search in October was 303, up 573% from 45 in September. See this post for more details about search engine traffic. In November, I expect a 60% increase in search engine traffic due to more posts (and therefore more hits), better rankings, and adding the blog to Live Search and Yahoo! Search.

Social sites. This is traffic coming as a result of publishing the posts in sites such as facebook, digg, reddit, etc. In October, there were 909 visits in this category, up from only 26 in September. This was by far the largest category in October, accounting for half the visits. 97% of all hits are from reddit.com, and I'll publish a separate post about this topic. In November I expect an increase of 75% in this category, due to a planned marketing push to several of these sites.

Other Family Friendly Food properties. This is traffic from other blogs that my wife writes (such as her new blog at Seattle P-I and Good Food Bad Food) and this blog. Traffic was up 907% to 141 visits in October. In November, I expect an increase of 50% primarily due to traffic from the Seattle P-I blog (which only came online a few days ago).

Other referring blogs. This is traffic originating from other blogs, usually food blogs. There were 93 visits in this category, up from 12 in September. Bloggers try to increase their traffic by posting comments in other blogs with a link back to their blog. Nurit is not very active in this, so I only expect a modest increase next month.

Direct traffic. This is users directly navigating to the site, probably by clicking a link in an email. There were 258 direct visits in October, up from 102 in September, but I don't expect any increase in November. I am planning to see if there are ways to improve the instrumentation for this category.

Web Mail. This is users clicking on a link in mail programs such as Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail. There were 39 visits in October, and a similar number (35) in September. I don't expect any change in November.

Portals. This is a new category including things such as My Yahoo!, iGoogle and web news readers (such as Google Reader). It only had 15 visits in October (up from 2 in September), so it is too early to have a good plan for it. I will track it closely in November.

In terms of the quality of the visits, the number of pages per visit and average time in each visit went up slightly in October, after going down in September.

Google 4 - Microsoft 0

I've just realized that all the technology I use for the blog belongs to Google. Microsoft either doesn't have the services at all, or the Microsoft services are not up to par with Google's.

Blogging platform: I use Blogger, which was acquired by Google in 2002. While it has its own limitations (and I am considering moving to a more advanced blogging platform than Boller), Microsoft's Live Spaces is nowhere near the requirements for a professional blog. I actually like Live Spaces, but it is far behind Blogger, mainly in terms of ability to customize and extend.

Ads: I use Google's AdSense to place ads in the blog. Microsoft doesn't seem to have the ability for publishers to put ads on their sites (as far as I can tell). Microsoft has adCenter which allows advertisers to create ads (competes with Google's AdWords), but that I need the publisher's feature.

Statistics: I use Google Analytics for site usage statistics (see this post for more information). I have received a comment that Microsoft now has this service too. It is called Microsoft adCenter Analytics, and it is currently in Beta by invitation only. From reading the FAQ, the features seem comparable more or less to Google's. There is one feature that Microsoft has and Google doesn't (demographics by age, gender and occupation (not clear what is the source of the data)), and the FAQ state that "...we believe that adCenter Analytics will eventually provide the most useful Web analytic reports and customer insights on the market today,..." (not sure how eventually and today work together). Anyway - I have registered and I am in the waiting list to try it.

Search: I have now added the ability to search within the blog. I have chosen Google's search for 2 reasons: (1) Live Search doesn't currently even index the blog (even though Google found it months ago); I have now explicitly asked to add it to Live Search, we'll see how that goes. (2) Google's search supports publishing ads as part of adSense, while Live Search doesn't.

Too bad...

Search engines

I have been looking at traffic to the blog coming from search engines.

In terms of percentage of total traffic, it has grown from 14-15% in August and September, to over 21% in the first 3 weeks of October.
In terms of number of visits originating in search engines, it started with 22 in August, went up to 45 in September, and it is over 190 in the first 3 weeks of October. That is a huge growth.

Google
Google is at 97% (the remaining 3% is search.com, ask.com and aol.com (which I also think is powered by Google)). Live search and Yahoo! do not appear at all.
When investigating this, I found out that Live search and Yahoo do not even index the blog, even though it has been linked from other sites (such as wflavors.com) for more than 3 months. Sigh... I have now submitted the url of the 1. Family. Friendly. Food. site to both Live search and Yahoo!. We'll see in a few weeks if it helped.

Why is search growing?
It is hard to tell for sure why October is so much bigger than the previous months. I'll continue to track and see the trends going forward. There are two reasons I can think of:

• the blog has more and more content, and therefore more and more searches will find answers in the blog (it maps to more keywords).


• the blog gets linked from more sites as time passes, and therefore its popularity grows and it will come up more on the first page of some searches.

Is search traffic good?
When looking at visitor loyalty, search traffic tends to be lower than the site average. The average time on site was 40% lower than the average in September (but only 10% lower than the average in October) and the number of returning visitors tends to be close to 0 (as opposed to 20-30% on average).

The advantage of having a lot of returning visitors is that once you have paid the price to gain them as a customer, they come back (so are are starting to see an ongoing flow of income from them). On the other hand, given that the cost of acquiring a customer from search is pretty much 0 (we don't have any ads to bring in people), it is still good. For example, in terms of impressions from ads, they still count regardless of how much time they spend in the site.

Next steps
Here is what I plan to do next regarding search engine traffic:

• Look at sites that claim to increase traffic by submitting the site to lots of search engines, such as SubmitExpress.com


• Look at improving the keywords / meta tags to attract more traffic.


• Analyze the top keywords that caused traffic to the site


• Brainstorm changes to the site design that will help this kind of users be more loyal (stay more times / return more / subscribe to the RSS feed, etc.)

On the way to be rich

I have added ads to my blog. Not yet to 1. Family. Friendly. Food. (more about that in a separate post), but it's a start.

In the first 20 days of October I have already made $0.18. Some of you might think it's not a lot, but I can tell you that you are wrong. If I continue at this rate, it will be about $100 until I retire. As you can see, that's a lot. :-)

More info: 135 impressions, 10 clicks, 7.41 CTR, $1.31 eCPM. I only have a vague idea what these terms mean, but I am plannign to learn.

No chain letters for you!

In my previous post, I have tried to convince people to help me do some direct marketing. I wasn't expect that much (given that you guys are all a bunch of _____ [this is the part where I loose the small audience that I might have remaining]).

But still, the result was pretty much 0. Flat. No change. I won't be wearing my "glass half full" shirt tomorrow... Oh, well... Life goes on.

I'll try something more effective. Stay tuned!

Not a chain letter, but...

In one of the previous posts, I have mentioned that the main sources of traffic are direct traffic (mainly someone sending an email explaining how great a site this is), links from other sites and search engines.


The first type is not very sustainable, but before completely forgetting about it, I've decided to give it a try. And here is where you come in! I would like you to send this truly wonderful site to everyone you think might be interested, and ask them to forward it on.


Some of you might be thinking that you are not the type of person who sends chain letters! This is not the case, my friends. We are all trying to figure out how to give our kids and families good healthy food while not spending all our day in the kitchen. And we know lots of other people who are also facing the same challenges. So send them a link to 1. Family. Friendly. Food. and make them happy. And ask them to make more people happy.


"But I don't know anyone who eats or has families", some of you might say. Hmmm... That's a tough one. Really? Are you sure?




To make things more interesting, we will take some bets. Please comment on this post with either how many people you have sent an email about this, or with your guess of what spike we'll get from this exercise. My goal is 100 visitors in 1 day. Click on the image below to see the current direct traffic.



Don't procrastinate! Click send now. Let's see who will be the first to add a comment.

Browser SQM?

In my previous post about statistics, I have shown all kinds of numbers about the usage of the site. I am using Google Analytics to track usage data for the site (I have checked, and Microsoft doesn't have a similar feature, at least not yet).

To enable it, you get a unique site id from your Google Analytics account (everything is free), and then add a little bit of Java Script to all your pages, and ... Google Analytics starts gathering data from all the user sessions. For each user it tracks things like their location (up to the city level), browser, network speed, etc., length of the visit, how many pages and the exact order of pages visited, if it is a new user to the site or a returning user (using a cookie), if the user is coming from a referring site (and which site), or a search (and what were the search keywords), etc.

The amounts of data are huge, and Google Analytics offers lots of predefined reports to slice and dice the data in various ways.

Seriously, now

OK, so I had some fun with the Q1 FY09 financial results, but I am taking this seriously, and I need your help to succeed.

In the next posts I will start drilling down into the business and marketting side.

First Quarter Results

Bellevue, WA - October 7, 2008. 1 Family. Friendly. Food today announced first quarter revenue of $0.00 billion for the period ending September 30, 2008, a #DIV/0! increase over the same period of the prior year. Operating income for the quarter was $0.00 billion, and dilluted earnings per share were $0.00.

“We are pleased with the increasing pace of revenue growth throughout this fiscal year fueled by strong demand for our new offerings,” said the chief financial officer. “We are now accelerating our investments in the business to drive future growth, which is reflected in our financial guidance. We believe next fiscal year will deliver even stronger double-digit revenue growth than this year.”

Business Outlook
Management offers the following guidance for the quarter ending December 31, 2008:

• Revenue is expected to be in the range of $5 to $10.
• Operating income is expected to be in the range of $4 to $9.

Forward-Looking Statements

Statements in this release that are "forward-looking statements" are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially because of factors such as:

• challenges to our core business model;
• intense competition in all our markets;
• our continued ability to protect the company’s intellectual property rights;
• claims that we have infringed the intellectual property rights of others;
• government litigation and regulation affecting how we design and market our products;
• our ability to attract and retain talented employees;
• delays in product development and related product release schedules;
• significant business investments that may not produce offsetting increases in revenue;
• adverse results in legal disputes;
• unanticipated tax liabilities;
• impairment of goodwill or amortizable intangible assets causing a charge to earnings;
• changes in accounting that may affect our reported earnings and operating income;
• exposure to increased economic and regulatory uncertainties from operating a global business;
• general economic and geo-political conditions;
• natural disaster, cyber-attack or other catastrophic event disrupting our business;
• acquisitions and joint ventures that adversely affect the business;
• limitations on the availability of insurance and resulting uninsured losses;
• sales channel disruption such as the bankruptcy of a major distributor;
• implementation of operating cost structures that align with revenue growth;
• and foreign currency, interest rate, fixed income, equity and commodity price risks.
  

Statistics

In this post I'll cover some of the statistics we've seen so far.

Nurit started her blog 1 Family. Friendly. Food on July 15, 2008. She posted 20 posts in July, 11 in August and 17 in September. In the past 2 months it has been about 5 posts per week.

Visitors
Below is a graph showing the number of visitors over time (click to enlarge).



As you can see, excluding a peak on July 31st that I cannot explain, September looks much better than July and August, which is good. The total number of visits from unique visitors more than doubled from August (102) to September (250).

Traffic Sources
In August, 86% of the usage came from direct traffic (i.e. users going directly to the blog, usually when getting an email pointing to it), 4% from referring sites, and 10% from search engines.
In September, 46% of the usage came from direct traffic, 40% came from referring sites, and 15% from search engines.

	Direct traffic	Referring sites	Search engines
August	86%	4%	10%
September	46%	40%	15%

This is a positive development. Direct traffic is basically my wife emailing to everyone she knows asking them to look at the blog, and similar activities (such as giving a talk about the subject in our son's daycare). While these are good to get initial traffic going, they do not scale to more than a handful of visitors. Increasing the traffic from referring sites and search engines is much more sustainable. The peak on September 23rd (28 unique visitors) is because of a comment that Nurit posted on a high traffic blog, which resulted in traffic back to 1 Family. Friendly. Food. The higher peak on September 25th (82 unique visitors) is being referred from the navigation bar at the top of the blogger.com site (that one is still a bit of a mystery, but the only relevant button there is the "Next blog" one. It seems to pick a random blog, so why where there so many hits that day? The only explanation I have is that the day before Nurit added a "Powered by Blogger" gadget to her blog, and maybe that's how she got compensated...)

There are huge amounts of usage data available. In the next post, I'll talk a little about the technology used to gather data and what is available to mine.

Vision and Target Audience

In order to make 1 Family. Friendly. Food. a success, one has to understand first its vision and target audience.

Nurit's primary goal is to show that it is not difficult to eat healthy homemade food. Here are the main types of posts in her blog:

• Dinner tonight posts give easy recipes and tips for preparing dinner at home (entrée and side dishes)
• A cake for the weekend is a collection of simple recipes for dessert. I love the smell of fresh cake when coming home from work on Friday evening!
• In the try something new posts, Nurit dares people to expand their culinary repertoire
• Cooking with kids tell stories on how our son is helping in the kitchen. Kids and food are some more thoughts around kids menus and teaching kids the basics of healthy eating. Those are some of my favorites.
• Other categories of posts include reviews of good cookbooks, making good use of leftovers, some time saving kitchen tools and more.

The primary target audience of her blog are busy people, mainly families with kids. They want to eat good, nutritious food, and educate their children for a healthy life, but are pressed for time. They are looking for simple, proved solutions.

The follow up question is who is the competition and what are the characteristics of this market. I have not explicitly looked into this yet, but I will start looking into this in one of the next posts.

In the next post I plan to give an overview of what we have done so far, and the current status of the traffic to the site.

Thoughts? Send me a message or comment.

The Beginning

I'm starting this blog to track the progress of the blog that my wife Nurit is writing (1 Family. Friendly. Food.) from its humble start till its success (I am wearing my "half full" shirt today, so not succeeding is not an option).

My definition of success is getting a lot of traffic and being able to monetize it. My bet right now is that getting a lot of traffic will be the difficult part, monetizing that traffic should be easier.

The theory is that in order to succeed, I need to define a goal (something like $1M in revenue in 1 year), but I am an incremental guy. So I'll start with measuring the current traffic and define the first goal derived from that, and keep increasing it. Stay tuned for details in one of the next posts.

Why would you read this blog?

• You want to see how my marketing / business efforts are going. That should be fun.
• You want to hear my observations on the technical side of things. Don't expect too much.
• You are bored.
• You want to be an active participant and forever be remembered as someone who helped make this experiment a success.
• You wonder if things are recursive, and if there is a relationship between this blog's success and Nurit's blog success.

In the next posts, I'll give a brief overview of Nurit's vision, some background of what we've done so far, where we are today, and start defining goals and strategies going forward.

Thoughts? Ideas? Send me a comment.