Promoting the Chinese / Taiwanese blogospheres: a personal SEO study-case

During March earlier this year, I discussed using SEO as means to promote the Taiwanese blogosphere in "English Taiwan : The websphere, the blogosphere, traffic, SEO and the need for a profound change". I got mixed responses - few supported, most criticized. I don’t want to raise the whole issue again as it’s almost a religious debate, but I feel like I owe it to my blogosphere to share the personal SEO studycase for "fiLi’s world" to try and convince my fellow blogger friends within the Chinese and Taiwanese blogospheres to look into this. I will also offer my personal help. Yep, it is going to be a bit technical.

Right after that controversial post, I decided that the best way is to just do it myself and see what the results would be like. All that I implemented was written down and shared with my friends and colleagues on fiLi’s tech. If you’re interested - I now have 3 months of stats to share with you.

I’ll start off with using the problematic Alexa rank to show some results, as it’s the best tool I can use to show the general trend and compare it to other sites of my blogosphere. Please take a look at the following comparison between fiLi’s world and one of my favorite China blogs - the popular Danwei blog (/website/community).

It’s quite easy to see that something happened during March, as the incoming traffic from search engines began to climb up. Here’s the same graph for the site rank, with fiLi’s world making it into the top 100,000 sites in less than a month after changes, now ranked ~70,000:

What do those stats mean for actual traffic? Google Analytics shows that traffic from search-engines increased by over a 150%.  Maybe it’s just one-time visitors? Feedburner suggests that the same effect is also true for RSS subscribers.

Did something change in my posting frequency? Yeah, I don’t post as often as I used to. Did something change in what I write about? not really, I’m still in my tiny niche of the Israeli perspective on China and Taiwan. Is it just me? Three of my friends and other bloggers in the Israeli blogosphere support these findings.

What does this mean? It might not mean anything, this could be completely unrelated to anything I did. But, you might want to consider the possibility that in an hour of simple SEO Wordpress tweaking you can help seriously promote what you write about.

With projects like Chinalyst and Taiwanderful, it’s important for me to do what I can to help the Chinese and Taiwanese blogospheres grow. If you’re a China/Taiwan Wordpress blog - I’ll be happy to help you out. First, you can read up on fiLi’s tech Wordpress section on things that you can do yourself. If you’re not good with tech stuff and you need somebody to do this for you, then backup everything (yeah, everything!) and send me all your account login details and I’ll do what I can within my time constraints (you’ll change into something else after I’m done). Disclaimer - I guarantee nothing and I take no responsibility whatsoever. I ask for nothing in return, but I would appreciate it if you’ll report your findings back to the blogosphere to let us know how you’re doing.

 
tags: Asia, Blogging