So, I started determinedly attempting to get traffic up at the beginning of this month. An experiment to see whether by consciously chasing Google traffic I could get a few more people passing by.

I have to say that such determined Google Whoring does indeed seem to work. It’s often a little difficult to know before hand which particular post will "take off" but, as an example, having the number one Google entry for Jennifer Anniston’s new squeeze does tend to bring the crowds in.

Traffic numbers have more than doubled. Here we are at the 15th of the month and we’ll crack through 100 k visits and 125 k page views later today for the month to date. That compares with 50-80 k visits and 75-120k page views in a normal month. That increase in traffic has raised the Alexa ranking by 25 k places as well.

A much more important question though is whether it’s actually worth doing this? Well, sorta, for me at least, as I’ve got an advertising contract that insists my Alexa ranking must not drop below a certain level. So it’s good to know that if it looks like doing so then I can correct that.

However, in terms of money….no, it isn’t. In fact, the three different ad networks that you see on this page….one has gone up slightly in revenues, one has gone down slightly and the other stayed static, despite the more than doubling of traffic. So a tentative conclusion would be that quality of traffic is of much greater importance than volume of it…and that search engine traffic ain’t all that high quality.

So, onwards, and let us find out, at the end of the month, whether deperately chasing search engine traffic is actually worth the candle. I have a feeling it isn’t.