So I wrote a prayer of hope - to spread the fragrance of peace and love amongst those grieving, angry, and the very sad in Mumbai, and then across the World. The morning after the posting, I decided to share the prayer (and hope) with as many people as I could, so I got around to submitting the blog post on my favorite article sites, and social bookmarking communities.

What happened next is very interesting.

Please don’t misunderstand me, I don’t wish to make little of the situation, or take advantage of what happened in Mumbai from a SEO’s perspective, but the idea behind this blog post is to share a real SEO experience.

In the next few hours I saw a steady rise in the traffic that was coming to the blog post. On the article sites and social communities this post was getting more traffic and more click-backs to my profile and URL than any other previous posting I had made. Over the next two days there was a steady stream of traffic to my post and it’s still not stopped, making it my most successful post till date.

So what just happened here? Why was I getting all this additional traffic?

An event that’s newsworthy generates a lot of search engine traffic as people are already hungry for that information, and the media is probably already promoting it. By tweaking your keywords and by creating relevant content you could create a funnel of traffic to your website.

Are there any events happening in your city that could be newsworthy? Is there a release of a very popular movie? Is there going to be an event that the media will give lots of coverage to? Is there a festival around the corner? Or a new rock band coming to the city?

“Then by creating value and content for the users searching for information about those events could drive potential traffic and business your way”

A word of caution here! Don’t tag events that don’t have some kind of synergy with the services or products you are offering. Don’t create pages of content which are not useful to the user. And don’t overdo it! Be selective and plan well so you get your keywords ranked high well in advance.