My 100th blog post, How it is going so far.

This is my 100th blog post, and as such I wanted to just write something that is a milestone of sorts in terms of how things are going with this site. So far at 100 posts, it seems like I am just beginning to gain some ground with Google’s Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). The site is Still not getting much traffic, but that is to be expected sense I am still not spaming my content anywhere on social media (yet). Also I am running into many challenges that I need to overcome in order for this site to actually be something of interest to people.

One hundred blog Posts is just the beginning

It has not been a year yet sense I started writing this blog, so I am still just starting out in the grand scheme of things when it comes to doing this. Thinking in terms of powers of ten the next step from here is one thousand posts, as I approach that I will suspect I will really begin to start to gain some real traction.

Mostly writing about javaScipt for now.

So far just about every post on my site has something to do with javaScipt. It is a github pages site anyway, so it makes sense to keep the content relevant to the use of github. It is also a personal blog, so I guess I could write about just about anything I want to. For now I mostly only break away from writing about javaScipt to make this kind of post, but I still do not really have a clear identity for this site.

Do not stop writing

Maybe why a lot of people give up on bloging or never start in the first place is because they do not stick to doing it or anything for that matter long enough to really get somewhere with it. They might write a hand full of posts, spam the content at some social media site, get a tiny bit of traffic for a short while, and then nothing. As such they get discouraged, assume it is not possible to have a successful blog, and then give up.

I have come to find that it is better to not manually promote at all, and instead just let google index my content, and let goggles SERP pages promote my site for me. In oder for this to result in some real traffic I have to write a whole lot of content though, so game on!

Every new post I write is another page that google will index, as such every new post I make is like buying a new asset. It’s like buying land, only I never really know what I am going to get. Sometimes its like ending up with a single square foot of land in the middle of a dessert, other times it’s like a nice piece of lake front property.

Keywords in google search

As of this post my best preforming post is the one I wrote on jimp both in terms of impressions as well as clicks through to this site. I am getting over 2000 impressions, and some 100 clicks a month with just that one post. Still from what I have read that kind of performance is not that great.

From studying the content of that post, and doing a little keyword research I can see why it is doing well (as far as I am concerned at the moment with what doing well means). It is a combination of repetition of the term JIMP in the body of the post, combined with outbound links to related sites of interest that I think is doing the trick. I found this great post that explains a lot of the factors that goggle does (or might) take into consideration when determining page rank.

Outgoing links seem to help

Whenever I write about something like jimp for instance I provide an outgoing link to a major page of interest such as the npm package page.

length of posts

From what I have read there seems to be a whole lot of chatter about the length of posts, and that they should be at least some 300 words, and preferably over 1000. So far I cant confirm that content length makes a big difference. Many posts of mine are below 300 words, and seem to be doing okay relative to everything else. In addition my longest post is not getting any traffic at all, as such for the moment I am not seeing a direct correlation between length and performance in SERP pages.

Still longer posts might result in hitting more keywords, but in any case what really matters is the nature of the content itself, short, or long.

Frequency of posts

This site has been an experiment to find if getting into bloging is something that is even worth and investment of time at all. As such when I was first getting started I did not post very often, during the summer I was down to writing only one post per month. However now that I am beginning to see that doing this is not a waste of time, I am taking it more seriously. As of late I am now trying to get up to an average of one post per day, and maybe even more than one a day.

I know there is a lot of chatter that states that posting to often is a bad thing for organic search, however there is also chatter that writing many posts a day is great if you have the time to do so. In any case I am following a strategy that does lean more in the direction quantity, rather than quality. From what I am observing in google search console, short posts can still preform well, it’s really all about what is being written regardless of the volume of text.

Write about Stuff that people actually use, and search for.

When I was first starting out I had no idea what I was doing. To this day I still consider myself somewhat of a novice when it comes to writing content. Some of my oldest posts have to do with random things that come to mind about some game mechanic in a game I was developing.

Then I got the idea that it is silly to write about something that only I might be searching for, so I started wring about other peoples javaScript projects rather than my own. However I was not taking into account popularity of projects, as such some would do okay, and others would just be yet another dead post.

Now I know better I use tools like google trends to know that I should say “javaScipt code example” rather than just “javaScipt example” when referring to a code example of something.

for example:

So here is the javaScipt code example of using an object.

var obj = {foo:'bar'};
console.log(obj.foo); // 'bar'

I also look into other factors that help me gain some incite if something is worth writing about or not, such as how many stars the project has on github.

To 1000 posts!

I aim to do it, it might take years, or maybe even just a few months if I go nuts with this. In any case I think I might write more posts like this when a certain major milestone post number like this comes along. In any case I hope the next 100 posts are even better than the first.