One of my websites which I discuss here in SEO case studies is www.narutowallpaper.biz which gets about 15,000 uniques per day. Well I am done with Naruto as a topic, the website has plateaued because I rank on the first page of image search for almost every Naruto related keyword - there are no keywords left to target.

Image search is my favored traffic source for wallpaper sites because of the significant amounts of traffic is brings without too much effort. To increase traffic and revenue my options are these: expand my traffic sources, or target a more broad topic than Naruto. Since image search seems like the best traffic source for wallpaper websites I’d rather not find new and different traffic sources, so I’m going to be expanding from Naruto to Anime. Anime is the animation style which Naruto fits in to, so if my topic is Anime I can target 10 or 20 times as many keyword than I can with Naruto, as with an Anime website I can target: Naruto, Dragonball Z, Bleach, One Piece, and the list goes on.

Since I am making this change my focus will no longer be on www.narutowallpaper.biz but will now be on www.downloadanime.biz. Download Anime is an anime wallpapers website and is currently one month old, has about 700 uniques per day and is growing steadily. I am currently adding content, building backlinks, and waiting for the Google ImageBot. Prepare for another SEO case study (some time)!

Popularity: 21% [?]

Knowing where your competitors get their traffic from can be very useful for increasing your own traffic, thanks to Google and Google Analytics we can find this very information. In Google Analytics there is an option to export as pdf, and many people use this option, and then upload the report to their web hosting. Luckily for us Google also manages to index some of these reports, so using a search query such as filetype:pdf intitle:dashboard “referring sites” “keywords” will return roughly 1000 Google Analytics reports for various websites.

Analytics reports don’t do us much good unless they are for websites in a similar niche, so add a keyword to the end of that search to find more targeted reports, but make sure it’s not a too specific niche. Something broad like filetype:pdf intitle:dashboard “referring sites” “keywords” games is suitable. The previous search returns 6 results, of those I only read the reports of websites with lots of traffic which for this search is only two websites, and one of them is irrelevant.

With these reports you should note their most successful keywords and best referring sites. Does anybody else have any ideas for discovering competitors’ traffic sources other than Analytics and Awstats?

Popularity: 30% [?]

I paid a designer $30 to redesign the banner of www.narutowallpaper.biz with hopes of improving the look of the site, the designer successfully made a better looking banner (I conducted a poll) but I also received something I wasn’t expecting; the page views per visitor increased from 5.5 to 6.5 overnight, and the banner is the only thing that was changed.

There was no change in traffic sources, no change in content, just a change in look and feel. An extra 1 page view per visitor multiplied by the 15,000 uniques per day that www.narutowallpaper.biz gets and I will have an extra 15,000 ad impressions per day, the banner will pay itself off in no time.

For people who are interested, following are the original and new banner designs. Here is the designer’s website.

Popularity: 45% [?]

I recently ran into an impressive Wordpress plugin, Search Meter. What it does is track the searches which your visitors do in the search form of your Wordpress blog/site, it then reports to you; the most recent searches, the most popular searches and the most popular searches which returned no results. Here is a screenshot -



The most useful part of the plugin is the unsuccessful searches summary - put simply, these keywords are what your visitors want to read but you are not providing, so this could be a great source of inspiration for post topics. Additionally, if somebody is searching for a keyword in your search form there is probably many more people searching for it in the search engines, so creating a page targeting this keyword will likely bring search engine traffic assuming there’s not too much competition.

This plugin is just for Wordpress but you could easily code this into your custom developed website with basic to intermediate PHP and MySQL knowledge, I have explained how to code search tracking in another post - Have you SEOed your search feature?. This method is a great way to find keywords which you really should be targeting but aren’t, I hope you can utilize it well.

Popularity: 44% [?]

StumbleUdon (mispelling of StumbleUpon) is an automated stumble exchange, it makes it very easy to get 5 or more stumbles on one of your pages each day. 5 stumbles equates to 100+ visitors from StumbleUpon from spending about 1 minute on the StumbleUdon website. To me 1 minute for 100 visitors is a good deal. You need an invite to join, but invites can be found quite easily on webmaster forums like Digital Point.

If your website is brilliant, those 5 stumbles may well be enough to start a chain reaction of stumbles which could bring 1000s of visitors rather than 100 if your site is just average.

Popularity: 48% [?]