@Richael, Well, I will try to do similar contests next year as well but would not run it in the same formati because it’s a lot of manual work for me. In fact, I had to delay some of my posts here due to this extra work. Perhaps, I will do the event in another format next year.

As for the top commentator thingie, I really want to reward people who are regular here and genuinely commenting. So I use the floating window approach… basically I display the top commenters for the past seven days and it doesn’t get reset every week or month. I guess this is a fair approach. For example, in Nihar’s case he would have made a comment exactly seven days back which went out of the seven days window this morning

My approach has the following advantages:-
- No reset and hence suddenly there is no void or empty space suddenly on a day
- Some smart people who visit only on day 1 of the month or week, comment, and disappear for rest of the month/week will not get credit

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@Nihar, what you have achieved so far is really a significant traffic improvement! But even with the initial value being high (or four digit daily traffic) you can still go to higher levels With real keyword research (Even off topic keywords) anything is possible!

But another point here is whether you want to spoil the goodwill of your blog by bringing in search traffic not related to your niche!

And for the final week, the range is Jan 5 – Feb 15 and hence probably some of your weak traffic issues in the beginning may be offset if you get good traffic this week.

@Kurt, I think blogs like yours, that talk about more current affairs, can really exploit Google Trends, Hot Trends and Suggest. I won’t take this route though as I write about a totally different set of topics that may not be always ‘current’. I would think that you should use top four or five keywords in Google Trends (top 10) and cross check it with Hot trends (100) for any common behaviour there and also check with Google suggest once to pick the most natural keywords.

Perhaps the experts here could help you and me out further

@Nicholas, a lot of good tips for all of us, right?

@Richael, from where you started, it’s a steady improvement…but yeah, one needs to think about other priorities and main job in life as well, right? Frankly speaking, I do not do too much of SEO but most of my search traffic (something like 80-85 visitors max from search per day) have low bounce rate. Looks like people actually read my stuff

@Rajiv, definitely these are amazing numbers! Hopefully these numbers are also resulting in building long term readership and monetization as well.

@Binary, Defenitely, we are all keen to learn from NIhar as well. Improving the daily search visits by 800 or so extra is no joke! It’s a great achievement.

@Ardit, you should have a decent percentage of search traffic to continously build your readership. This will also help to monetize your blog better.

@Shirley, yep…they are doing an amazing job!

@Abhishek, thanks buddy… Please participate next time

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@Ajith, What is you take on my question in the comment about?

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@Nihar can you share your seo strategy?

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@Kurt,
Yes, keyword research is something I would love to learn. Its a very gray topic, looks very complex for me.

All the best to all of you. I really like the tips of Simon mostly the part about Google Suggest which is also a great tool. However I have one question to the participants and to you Ajith:

Which is the best to work with on google trend… the keywords among the top 10 or the ones among them last near the 100th? My question may seem weird but I will be glad to know the exact steps of how the participants uses the google trend keywords and if with other tricks to attract maximum traffics from search engines.

I have moved from number 10 to 9 position. I will be somewhere there by the end of the contest.

This is because my Week 1 is 1276.88. Check any other blog all are in 3 digits or 2 digits figure.

In week 5, i have reached 2082.95. So, it clearly shows that those who already have significant search engine traffic has very less chance to top it even though they get increase their traffic.

Ajith, i think Otto will go to 1 because, his traffic increased from week 1

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