In this article I'm going to share my first hand experience of search engine optimization (SEO) with webtrickshome and my achievements so far.
Rather than starting straight from what I did, I would like to start from the very beginning of this site webtrickshome, how I started it along with the statistics from the first year (2017) and the second one (2018). That will give you the clear picture.
How it was started?
I was working as a web designer cum php developer in a development company for a couple of years before I got a call from one of the best web development training insitute in my city to give classes on web designing. Since, it was a part time job that would not hamper my regular job and add up a handsome remuneration to my monthly gross income, I accepted it.
A couple of months later, I realized that, I generally tend to miss some of the key topics in one or another class and had to connect with my previous students via social media i.e. Facebook to make them know what they missed and provide them with links from w3schools so that they could learn those topics on their own.
At that moment, I felt the need to create a reference material for myself which I could look at and never miss any topics thereafter. So, I built this application which I would run on local server whenever needed as a guide.
Life was going smooth until one day when one of my students told me that he had noted the url I was using and entered the same in his browser but couldn't find the site and asked if I could make it available for everybody so that they could also use it for reference whenever needed.
I liked his idea and hence searched for a good domain name, uploaded my application in the server. That's the way webtrickshome started in the evening of 18th July 2017.
Statistics from 2017
On the first day, I got 8 users, 7 from my own city and one from United States with 172 page views. I was very excited with the result and started to keep tracking the site everyday. At the end of July, the total number of users was 42 with 103 sessions and 580 page views which was a big hit from my point of view because neither I was promoting it nor adding up any extra efforts on the site. It only contain the HTML, CSS and Bootstrap tutorials which were organized the way I would teach in the class and I was getting visitors from India, Russia and Philippines too.
August 2017 brought me almost the double amount of visitors and page views with visitors from Germany and Myanmar adding up. I started my facebook page webtrickshome and started to share some contents there. I started getting a couple of social, referral and organic visitors to my site while over 80% were direct hits.
From september onwards, my visitors and pageviews count was showing up a slight fluctuation but the percentage of organic and referral visits were going higher than the direct and social ones. The number of countries of visitors also expanded very well whereas I added photoshop and PHP lessons on basic PHP, object oriented PHP, Laravel and Wordpress.
Here's the analytics bar on users from the first day to the end of February when my shared hosting stopped its service due to legal issues with one of the site hosted along with mine.
It was a big hit for me as it was built for my students and was getting views from 75 other countries. Here's the list of the top 10 countries where my home nation is on the first position.
And, here is the traffic stats.
Statistics from 2018
On 4th April, I moved my site to my personal hosting and then added lessons on SEO along with sections added for question answer and blogs. That gave me above 1200 page views in a single month from 36 countries. It boosted my confidence that if I could manage a little time every single day, I could compete with the bigshots in this industry within a short span.
I started tracking my global ranking which was close to 15 million in May 2018 and then started to work on getting more views.
My SEO Strategies
Here's what I did to get more traffic to my site and better global ranking.
On Page SEO
The first thing I focused on was my website's techincal SEO factors like Meta Description, Heading Tags, URL length, File size and Site speed. I also rewrote some of the page titles to make them search engine friendly while adding keywords on the URL.
That gave me another 500+ page views than what I was getting from the total of 57 countries in May which further motivated me to work harder for my site.
Quora
The first platform that I chose to get referral traffics was Quora because it falls into top 100 websites worldwide and had a huge regular traffic. I could provide solutions to questions from people related to my industry. I joined Quora on 1st June 2018. I would add the link of my site or its inner pages in my answers wherever it was relevant. I get an average of 25k views per month on Quora from 832 answers, 48 followers till date along with almost 1400 backlinks to my site coming from Quora along with a good number of referral traffic everyday.
Laracasts
With great success in Quora, I joined another forum Laracasts which is a dedicated forum for Laravel developers, from where I have got almost 100 backlinks and a good number of referral traffic too everyday.
Another forum I joined was Reddit which provides over 100 backlinks to my site but since I couldn't dedicate enough time to spend on this forum everyday, my karma points in Reddit has gone down and hence I couldn't do much from there.
Other Forums
I also tried some other forums like Disqus, invisionzone,stackoverflow, etc with lesser success and then converted my own question anwser section to public forum. With lesser promotion, it is not well received so far but one day it might get bigger.
Social Platforms
From July onwards, I joined few facebook groups related to web design and development on Laravel and Wordpress where I share my contents once in a while and that has given me a good range of social traffic each day along with 1000+ followers on my facebook page too. I'm active on Twitter, Google Plus and Linkedin too.
Moreover, I have a youtube channel named webtrickshome where I upload tutorial videos once in a while that gives me a good referral traffic per day.
On June and July 2018, I got over 5,000 page views which in itself was a milestone for me that helped me get higher in global ranking. On August, I got over 10,000 pageviews which kept on increasing gradually while my global ranking also got better day by day.
By the start of November, my site's global ranking came below 1 million which is 907,882 as of now whereas I get over 900 aggregate page views per day where more than 60% is organic traffic, almost 20% social, 7% referral and rest is direct traffic. I have garnered around 3,300 good backlinks from 48 domains so far which will increase with each day passing. Here's the stats from November 2018.
I achieved all of these within 6 months by spending around an hour a day from 1st of June to mid October making my site visible on social platforms and forums. From mid October, I started a news site tesroaankha which will require my total focus for a couple of months before I could automate it. Till then, I hope my efforts so far will help me get better in the market.
Hope this article helps you get better ranked in search engines and achieve huge traffic and great backlinks without getting demotivated at the beginning. Nothing is easy and SEO takes time to show better results but that'll also take time to go down as well.
No single strategy will work universally for all of us. For example, being active on forum sections won't work for my news site. I must be highly active on social platforms and would need a lot of promotion campaigns. So, think about the techniques that work the best for you and go for it. Don't be afraid to try out a few. Ultimately, you will find the best one that works for you.
Let me know, what you have tried so far and which worked the best for you. Good Luck!
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