My thoughts (boring though they may be) about Google Adsense and SEO...

GOOGLE ADSENSE:

Well, I'm finishing March with my earnings *WAY* down from last month despite a substantial increase in traffic.  This has me extremely bumfuzzled (How I love this word.  Thanks, Margaret!), since I depend on my Google income to pay half the mortgage and I had the silly idea it would increase as my traffic increased.

Jim, you said your Google earnings were down about 2/3 earlier this month... did that hold?  Just curious.

I've been cruising a lot of Adsense forums, and the same cry can be heard everywhere.  I've only seen a couple of people counter it with, "Mine went up" or "Mine is about the same."

Very strange.

My husband (who knows diddly about any of this) was saying maybe people are hesitant to click on Google ads because of this big fuss over releasing information to the federal government... you spoze??

It's very strange, and I'm interested in what other people have to say -- not that it will change anything but it's still interesting (at least to me).

SEO:

Slow but steady...
Remember Mr. Tortoise...
Slow but steady...

For two months I've been working on my Giraffe Exhibit, trying to get "giraffe" near the top of the search engines like my more exotic critters are already.

Thanks to some great advice from several Dear Board Buddies, I stopped trying to get "giraffe" anyplace and started focusing on less popular keywords and keyword phrases.

I would have been done weeks ago if I weren't so obsessive-compulsive crazy, but that is neither here nor there.

Sunil Tanna told me to

• Use the keyword/phrase (and only the keyword/phrase) in the title tag, and
• Repeat the same keyword/phrase (and only the keyword/phrase) in the H1 tag as close to the top of the page as possible, and
• Create a "hierarchy" of links near the top of the page (i.e., Mammals > Giraffe > Behavior).

I can't believe how well that worked (yes, I've got good content, etc. etc., but I had that before; I have to believe this is what made the difference!!).

I'm seeing most of my "keyword phrases" on the first page of Google now -- and it was sudden, as soon as my new /giraffe/ directory was indexed. 

HOLY CRAPOLY!!

Here's the "slow-but-steady" part:

Some of my phrases only show 30 to 50 searches per month on Overture (they say, I believe, to multiply that by 10 for all the search engines or for Google or something, but I've never found that to be the case).  Of course I always tweak my phrases to get the highest number of searches, but in some cases I just can't do much better than this.

At one point I decided to drop a few pages, thinking, "You're nuts for wasting all this time on these stupid little phrases!"

Then Mr. Tortoise came to mind.

If I -- or you -- carefully target 100 phrases on 100 different pages and each of those phrases only gets 30 searches per month, and you get so close to the top that 25 of those people actually come to your site, that's 2500 new visitors in a month.

To my way of thinking, that ain't too shabby.

Sure, the keywords with a bzillion searches are better, but it's very hard to get to the top with those.  Lots of mine have a few hundred, and I'm doing pretty well with those too...

I'm just SO excited to finally have a system that seems to be working!!

(Now if my darn Google income would keep up with the traffic, I'd have something to sing about.)

Luv,