Every day I get roughly 10-15 PPC visits from Google and 6-8 from Yahoo (I actually get slightly more clicks than this, but some people apparently abandon the page view before the Javascript at the end loads). Today was the first day I got more organic hits than this, and they appear to be legitimate (i.e. not from pirates for a change). I think I can largely blame my blog for this, since after I discovered that it ranks higher than my site for key search terms (as a result of a post similar to this one, ironically) I made about 10 links for those terms from the blog to the appropriate content pages.
And, bam, 48 hours later I got crawled and my site went from the 3rd page of search results for, say, “d01ch w0rd b1ng0″ to the 1st page (I’m obfuscating that to not ruin my good luck — mea maxima culpa). Its not in the top 5 yet but I’ve got high hopes of reaching there eventually. I know from my PPC search impressions that some of these words get traffic in the hundreds per day, which if I could capture 10% of would be excellent.
So on my lunch break I was browsing the Internet and chanced upon Matt Cutt’s blog, and read the legal papers out of mild curiosity. I noticed a throw-away comment buried in there, got a little miffed, and decided to do some minor venting on the Internet. And I finished my workday, went out to bid fairwell to a friend leaving the country, and when I get back to my computer I’m on the front page of WordPress. Google certainly inspires some passion in people, what can I say. I understand that (and, if you’ve been following my posts about AdWords, you know I’m in general a fan), but there’s limits to my love of everything. Except chocolate ice cream and cute kittens.
Disclaimer: you know your market and your customers better than I do. Some of these will likely be different for people who are not pitching products to teachers.