As I’ve argued before (see It’s All About The Traffic, Stupid!), you need traffic to make money with a website. It doesn’t matter if you’re monetizing with AdSense, affiliate offers, CPA offers, or some other advertising system — no traffic, no conversions; no conversions, no money.

One way to get traffic is to show up in the top 10 results for a well-searched keyword phrase on Google. This is the Holy Grail of Free Traffic. But it can be very hard to hit that top 10, or even the top 20.

There is a way to do it on a temporary basis, though, with some effort. I call it the “Google ranking bounce”.

Here’s how it works: Google currently gives a “freshness boost” to newly-published content. If the site that hosts the content is authoritative enough, this freshness boost can be enough to temporarily catapult the new content into the top 30 results for the content’s main keyword. (We’re assuming good on-page SEO here, of course, with the main keyword in the title of the page and ideally also in the URL itself, plus sprinkled appropriately throughout the content.) The boost lasts for 2 or 3 days, after which the page will “slide down” to its natural rank, there to stay until it gets pushed up through “natural” means (i.e. link acquisition). The page may in fact disappear for a few days from the index before reappearing.

I’ve seen this boost happen on my own sites (I have a few old domains) and on sites like EzineArticles. You can get a real, but unfortunately temporary, traffic boost from this rankings boost.

So what do you do? Write several articles/posts of content targeted at the main keyword and then publish them several days apart. If you’ve done it right, the freshness boost will ensure that one of your articles is continually in the top 10/20/30 until your supply of content is exhausted.

This is not easy to do, and it takes real effort to write all that content. The best place to start is with EzineArticles, I think. Find a high-volume search term that displays two articles from EzineArticles in the top 10. You won’t be able to displace the first article, but you can probably temporarily push out the second article. You’ll be surprised at how many times your article will be viewed. It’s temporary, of course, and only some of the traffic will make it to your own site, but it’s a cheap way to get some good, targeted traffic.

If you try this technique, let me know how it goes for you. It definitely takes work, though. The good thing is that over time all the content you write will itself reach critical mass and help you rank higher in the future.

I’ve been reviewing things I’ve been doing lately and I’ve concluded that I’ve strayed too much from my core mission of AdSense coverage on this blog. As of today, then, I’m stopping any reviews of things that aren’t directly related to the Google AdSense program. Most non-AdSense discussions will also stop, although I can’t guarantee that I won’t let one slip in here and there.

If you’re interested in my reviews, you can check out the new reviews section of my personal website. (Yeah, the site’s very old school. I’m not about to futz with it, though.) Some of the reviews already published here are going to be summarized and/or rewritten and republished there. The first one, Beating AdWords Review, is up, more will follow.

I’m also in the midst of developing an SEO tool that I need and that I think others also need, I hope to have it ready for sale in a week or two. Warning: the price point will be fairly high, probably $150 or so. I’ve had some pushback about this, but because I don’t have a huge hype machine or mailing list to fall back on, it’s hard to make a decent return on my programming if I sell things for $10 a shot. Anyhow, I’ll make an official announcement here when the tool is out. If you’re not already on one of my lsits, though, send a blank mail to memwg@aweber.com if you want to get on my mailing list to get early notification.

If you have any features you’d like to see in an SEO tool, drop me a note or leave a comment here, maybe it’s something I can add to the tool if it’s not already supported. Think “If only I had a tool that did…” and let me know what’s missing from your life. Who knows, if you have a great idea I may even give you a free copy of the tool!

As of April 8, 2009, Google is requiring AdSense publishers to update their privacy policy with information about Google use of cookies for serving advertisements and how visitors can opt-out of those cookies. I have updated the Privacy Policy Plugin for WordPress to include language that complies with the new guidelines, so if you’re using the plugin please install the new version before April 8 to make sure your site stays compliant. You can see an example of what the plugin now generates from the MEMWG privacy policy page.