In the Beginning
Back to developing web site on the current trending / current events topics I tried presenting the topics for users to click on and begin a search using Google's search engine. Once again, this did not draw any traffic. Taking it a step further I had the current hot topic posted to twitter with a link back to the search site. Although some traffic started coming to the site, it did not offer anything more; nothing to engage the user.
The Search.SecureResearch.com site has been operational for a little over a month. The site is a personal web site developed to experiment with different aspects of web development, advertising, web metrics, and search engine optimization. This first iteration of the site was put online on January 22, 2010 and contained a simple text box with a search button. There was no traffic to the site which made use of google search for end user queries.
The next idea was to integrate Facebook with the searches. Seemed like a good idea, but again no traffic and it was totally useless. Besides, does someone really want their Facebook friends to know what they are searching for?
The Beginning of SearchStalker
Search engine optimization is an interesting topic. It is an art and science that once the people begin to fully understand and exploit, the search engines change their methods to ensure searches remain relevant. A thought popped into my head. It has always been interesting to me to see what people are looking for on the web. In collaboration with a good friend the SearchStalker blog was started. The thought is if we write about topics that are popular on the search engines we could get traffic to our site. My friend uses his knowledge of pop culture he writes commentary on the topics du jour. The SearchStalker blog, located at http://searchstalker.blogspot.com, has not received much traffic, but it seems to be growing at a slow steady pace. We do not use any paid search, just write about current topics that people are searching for. We continue to post to the SearchStalker blog; please have a look and perhaps you will get a good laugh from it.
Back to developing web site on the current trending / current events topics I tried presenting the topics for users to click on and begin a search using Google's search engine. Once again, this did not draw any traffic. Taking it a step further I had the current hot topic posted to twitter with a link back to the search site. Although some traffic started coming to the site, it did not offer anything more; nothing to engage the user.
What would a user interested want to see when they clicked on that link? Most likely they would want to see the latest news on that topic. Then I began to develop the current direction I am going in with the site, and what you can see today. For each trending topics we present a number of links to news, blogs, etc. that hopefully relate to the story. Each time the top trending topics change, we post the new trends to twitter to help bring people to the site. Although I would like to see more usage, I am happy with the amount of data I've been able to collect to date and it is more than enough to do some analysis.
I am now planning for the next iteration of this project. The plan included user recommendations, votes, and integration with Facebook (again). That's all for now, feel free to provide constructive feedback.
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