Resort Marketing

Up until this past summer, I was using the free WordPress.com blog hosting solution for this blog at ericinparkcity.wordpress.com. I decided to move to a self-hosted option at www.ericinparkcity.com, in order to test out more options that are available in the WordPress.org package as well as to see what SEO options would be available on one platform versus the other. I’ve posted about organic search before, but this past week saw some wild results that I’d like to share.

I don’t check stats on my old blog very often, but when I looked last week, I saw a huge spike in traffic:

To cut to the chase, the Olympics Men’s Halfpipe event took place on February 17, and Shaun White won the Gold medal. How does that explain this spike? Well, last winter I wrote a post about the Silverton private halfpipe that Shaun was training on, and while it got a few views then, it was indexed nicely by Google. Indexed to the point where, according to Google’s webmaster tools, last week when searching for “shaun white private half pipe” my post showed in position 7 and when searching for “shaun white half pipe” the post was in position 8. Side note – after the competition, many major publications posted stories on this so my post is no longer on the first page of SERP (search engine results page).

I need to really look into why I wasn’t able to transfer this traffic to my new blog. However, this is such a classic case of the long tail of search that I had to write it up, as it clearly demonstrates that it’s hugely important to  create, publish and continue to create content online, because you never know when it might be of interest. Simply put, now is the time to “Publish or Perish!”

Tags:   organic search · seo · shaun white8762 Commentshttp://www.ericinparkcity.com/article/the-shaun-white-bump/The+Shaun+White+%22Bump%222010-03-01+04%3A48%3A56Eric+Hoffman