Case Study: How did I increase my search engine traffic by 258% in less than a month
Another study that I decided to do when I was checking out my results on search engine traffic on Balkhis. I realized since last month, I have made a significant increase on my Search engine traffic. In this case when I am saying Search Engine traffic, I am basically saying Google traffic. Well, I am sure you are interested in knowing the stats, so let me start with that.
Total Google Hits on Balkhis
Comparison of Image Search and Total
These traffic stats are from before and after the new design. Now you are probably wondering what changed in Balkhis. Well maybe Google just started loving me more because I was being a good kid writing quality content. Or maybe some of my tricks that I was trying worked.
Site load time was not the only issue with my previous design. There were a lot more to it that I changed. So hold tight while I cruise you through my journey.
Design Optimizations
In my previous designs, I was not using my heading tags very well. Content was not organized very well either. There was too much clutter in my header, so it took google bot a while to get to my content, therefore it couldn’t index everything like it was suppose to. So I cleared up the clutter in my header still a lot going on there right now, but there was a lot more before. Next thing I did was refined the use of my heading tags (<h2><h3>) through out the post titles, and inside the posts as well.
Before, my website didn’t look so good in google cached. What I mean was, it didn’t look like how it looks to users in main browsers. I don’t know how much of the effect that had, but I fixed that issue. I organized the content through out the site well. I also made image implementation in the content better than before.
Next thing that I did was I improved the navigation through out the site highlighting the important categories by putting them in the home page content area, where as others stayed in the sidebar. I also added one of the important things to my post and that was Bread Crumbs, so below each single post page, you should see a breadcrumb which gives you a path to where you are. I also added rel tags through out the site. Now what do I mean by rel tags? For example, in my profiles link I added rel=”me”. For Uzzz Production, I added rel=”designer”. We all know that there are rel=”nofollow” and such tags, but I got creative and made up my own tags. No where in an SEO book says that this type of creativity harms anything, but I said what the heck lets try it. It worked….
Lets move on towards how did I optimize my images.
Image Optimizations
I optimized my images. Jeez you all can see that through the page load time. No image size is not the only thing guys. I added alt tags through out the site. But you guys are wondering, I had those before too. Yes I did have them before, but before it was to satisfy w3 markup. So often, I left my alt tags blank. But this time, I can say that I have nice coders in the house 
We had a good talk about laziness, and avoiding those. So we took care of that problem. Another issue was that my last design wasn’t using name for images. I mean real names. Before it was names generated from Photoshop such as index_01 and so on. This time, I decided to change those to appropriate names such as logo, and each. Having a keyword name in the images, helped the ranking.
Next thing I did with images, that I started using images more often. Didn’t you notice that. Yes me too. One because my readers liked it. Two because google liked it. Hey if that kills two birds with one stone, I am all for it. By having more images, I increased my chances of getting indexed more.
Did I do any extra promotions? No, I didn’t. Actually I cut down my commenting on other blogs. Mainly because I was busy, but also it helped me because when I did reply I was posting even better comments. I focused on writing better content. Hence, I got more backlinks. But that is just normal as your blog grows and get more credibility you will get more backlinks, but the design changes are necessary.
So perhaps people who were thinking that design was not important in coding think again. By having such a great outcome, It increased my love toward magazine style themes even more. Heck I even wrote a post about What, When, Whys of magazine style themes at John Chow’s Blog.
I think that is where future of the blog is shifting towards and we will see more and more blogs turning that way as time progresses. If you want to switch to that direction and get an awesome SEO Friendly design for your blog. Contact Uzzz Productions. Or you can contact me through this blog.
Hey, I am Syed Balkhi, The guy who is behind Balkhis Inc. I entered the industry back in 2002 not knowing a single thing. I barely spoke English at that time. In the past six years, my language barrier has been eliminated. Aside from English, now I also speak html, and php. Along with the languages I have also managed to master a few arts. Art of web-designing started when I first entered. Messing around with photoshop, I learned how to create my first web design. Now I founded a web designing firm Uzzz Productions. After running numerous amount of websites in various niche, I have mastered the art of web-development. Now I am compiling a resource of what I already know, and what I am learning on this blog. This resource is to help me if I ever need a guide to look back to, and it is help my fellow webmasters.
I like that. JPG images at about 30K really speed things up. I use a lower quality still, but don’t sacrifice the quality too much to be noticeable.
Btw, congratulations on your increase in traffic. Great job!
Wow, congrats!
Everyone talks about the alt attribute, and how efficient it is, I haven’t done any SEO optimization yet, but I’m going to test these techniques, I hope they’ll work out fine, thanks.
The alt tags in an image is very useful. Because bots can’t read the text that you have on image. Or can’t see the image and understand what it means. Alt tag is your way of communicating with the bots.
I have just started adding alt tags to my images with keywords. And am starting to see my google image traffic shoot up!
That’s awesome, I am glad it helped.
Congrats on increasing your site traffic, the key to higher SERP is quality link building ( this includes internal , external and inbound linking activities ) and appropriate content structure. This is a great increase in one month
AWESOME POST!! This is EXACTLY what I have been eager to come across. Thank you for the great tips.
This is an amazing case study. I am glad that you are getting more traffic from the search engine. 258% is a huge increase in less than a month. You have to get excited when you are seeing those kind of numbers. I bet you can only see a bigger percent of increase ahead of you. A lot of people could increase their search engine traffic if they would read the SEO e-book.
I am actually very excited with the results. SEO books help a lot but I advise people not to read just one. Read a few, so you can get the idea. I actually prefer reading blog posts on various seo aspects, so I can get multiple views of that area.
Hm, I don’t think I get image search traffic at all (I do optimize size and have meaningful titles). Not many people look for software screenshots and such probably.
On indexing – I thought sitemap is supposed to inform google bot about content to index (so it doesn’t rely on pure crawling)?
On my blog I am in second week of zero google traffic. Asked around and opinion is that I am getting re-indexed or something. It will be interesting to see how long it takes and how it is going to affect traffic volume.
Sitemap is a good tool to have, but I choose not to rely on that. I have actually disallowed google bot from seeing my sitemap if you read my post about robots.txt
Reason being because sitemap highlights a lot of other links such as tags and so on which I don’t want to be indexed to prevent duplicate content. (Read my post on robots.txt if you want to learn)
You are not getting any visits from google because google has penalize you. Now I don’t know for what, but you can tell that when you don’t even rank for your own name.
I meant XML sitemap.
I had thought about penalty as well but as I said I asked two acquaintances who have some clue in SEO (unlike me
) and both said it doesn’t seem to be the penalty case. Well, if it doesn’t pass by itself I’ll have to start struggling probably.
Yes that is the sitemap that I mean as well. Wordpress can generate sitemap.xml for your site. But if you try generating yours.. .You will see it will link to your tags, archives and so on so forth. I don’t want those to be indexed in SE.
From my experience and knowledge, your site is penalized.
Sitemap plugin I am using (same you are using on this blog btw) allows to choose what links appear in resulting sitemap. Tags, categories and such can be easily excluded in settings.
Well, that makes score 2:1, non-penalized leads.
If I managed to get penalized it it going to be huge problem figuring out what needs fixing. I am not into SEO or anything and I don’t really see where I could break things to the point of google taking action.
To tell you the truth, at the start of this blog I submitted this blog in google webmaster tool, and it started dropping me for my ranking. Then I removed my sitemap from there and then I got the rank higher. With my experience in the industry.. I thought it was a bit fishy, so I tried the experiment again and got the same results. So then I just removed my sitemap from google webmaster tool, and banned google bot to see my sitemap.
If you want to try that for your blog .. maybe that might help.
Thanks for laying it all out for us like that Syed. You made some important points, and I’ve started paying more attention to how I name my photos. I need to implement alt tags as well.
You’ve seen some good growth, so I am taking notes!
that’s some huge growth there. :O will see which of your tips i can implement on my blog. thanks for the heads up.
Great post. Yeah you can get a lot of traffic through images, particularly via google. It just goes to show how important a good optimised design is for your blog.
An optimized design plays a key factor. And I can tell you that with this post. Yes I am using more and more images now because they are bringing visitors in.
Wow that is a really big jump in traffic!Well done and thanks for those tips
Those are amazing figures! Congrats.
Congrats! I got a nice increase this month as well but that is because I pay attention more to important keywords when I write a post and *ahem* repeat them in a nice way lol
hehe yeah keywords are important, but I have been doing that since day 1. Keyword traffic increases as you get more link building and so on, but this rapid increase was just awesome.
I would never in my wildest dreams thought that a design could make so much difference – pity I have no idea how to code… (just waiting to win pimp my blog in one of the next few months)
In my blog I have never actually targeted keywords, cos they are all so competitive in the MMO niche – but since I get so little SE traffic, I think I’m gonna have to start (and kick up posting frequency a bit more – I’m being lazy)
hopefully you will win
top commentators get more entries 
Well it’s looking pretty good at the moment – 29 entries so far
It’s amazing how quickly all the comments build up
yup that is a big motivation for me. stats and you guys… income is building up as well, but not nearly as high as some of the other top dawgs in the industry
Great improvement shown over the last month – that is excellent. Interesting what you mentioned about the use of alt tags.
This is indeed an excellent effort by Syed and which is keep on motivating me to get my hands on my blog as well.
I’ve been reading this blog for a long time now since it was first started, i would say it is a great achievement so far for the blog and i hope best for the future
Good luck Syed
This is really cool. I would love love love to increase my search rankings that much. I am going to try my best to do as much as I can to increase search rankings.
One of the things I am doing is taking my popular posts and re-editing them with keywords in blog and stuff to get more traffic
that is a good step to take
let me know ur results
Thanks for the tips… Well, I have been working on my theme to optimize it as well and there’s been some increase in search traffic but not as much as it yielded for you
Cheers,
Ajith
You’ve done a great job with your website Balkhis! I’m trying to optimize my website for SEO too, and just found out about the image alt features. So that’s why people bother to put it in! Now I’ll have to start doing it as well.
hehe yes
also use the seo category if u need more tips.
I was looking at some more great stuff you will share about ranking good in google- Seems you have still keep many things in secret with you – Is that so Balkhis ?
Did I really? I am assuming you have already looked at the things I advised in my SEO Category because I am also using those as well. Now I don’t think I needed to repeat those. I am sure those are having an impact as well, but in the last month above were the only changes I made …
That’s a pretty significant increase in traffic. I never thought of using the rel tag for something other then follow or nofollow. Great tips, and I hope your traffic keeps growing!
Very informative post there, thanks for sharing. Should try these tips.
I love your looks and your advice. You obviously love what you are doing and you are good at it.
But what about us, the little people that want to just get rid of our baggage?
Blogging can be therapeutic. It can be just a way of getting personal thoughts out in the open – without intent of making money necessarily but just sharing thoughts/ideas/experiences/talents, simple stuff like that.
There is nothing wrong with doing that. If you just get a neat designed theme for your personal blog. Use images that look good and use alt tags. You will get good traffic as well. Just make sure to have a voice.
Making money is not important with a blog.
People who start a blog with a thought of making money doesn’t go very far, and people who start a blog with the voice and something they love doing.. eventually go very far.
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Great post and its nice to see the actual results because of the things you did. I’m sure that if people follow this post that they will be able to see similar results. I know that changing my design and reducing load time has dramatically helped me as well.
Syed, do you think that having a cluttered website (I mean the look and all that) will reflect badly upon SEO? I just wanted to know.
The look no … But the way it is coded YES …
The way you arrange the keywords, anchors, alternate text on images, title, etc. will determine your rankings. But you may not want to clutter your site too much and drive your visitors away!
Titles and Tagging always help the overall rankings of the site. Labeling a picture properly can increase the keyword density of the page. The Alt text is very important. Having 5 images on a page could mean 5 more times that the keyword appears in the engine.
well great case study keep up the good work and keep helping people like me to know the internet deeper and deeper
Thanks for the help with Search Engines. Understanding them are one of the hardest parts of blogging, and you helped to shed a little bit more light on the subject. I am very impressed with your search engine traffic amount, 30000 is incredible! Your definately doing something right, and I appreciate you sharing it with us.
Jonathan Muller
it’s a great case study. useful to SEO beginners. Thanks a lot for giving such case study.
i agree, i just entered the seo field and this was pretty useful
Well done on the site improvement. I have been seeing steady gains as well as I continue to improve the site layout and optimization. Great tips and information keep up the good work.
excellent post syed.
How did you get google to index your images. ???
Umm how do you get anything indexed in google. I start getting backlinks from other people and google bots started realizing. More content I put, the faster it gets indexed. Then I started adding images and those starting to get indexed as well.
That’s cool.
I guess content update frequency (if there’s any increase) deserves another bullet.
And any benefit from boosting image search traffic?
AFAIK, image traffic doesn’t convert well in terms of backlink, brand promotion, etc.
Nice tips, especially, the design optimization…
I interest in how you maintain your reltag. I’ll try this and make a test. How it will improve my site.
Impressive results! Thanks for sharing with us how you did it. I do love the case studies. I try to apply all positive aspects I can to my biz.
That reltag is a new thing – haven’t heard that one before i will have to test that out. I think the bread crumbs helped the most.