Everyone who has a website wants more traffic coming into it. Unfortunately, webpages are a dime a dozen and most will languish in obscurity. There are a million articles about how to drive traffic to your web site, but here's my take.
There are four main ingredients for increased web traffic: participation, originality, time, and a good dose of luck.
1. Participate. Being active in the community will not only give you more backlinks, but it gives you a chance to show people your opinion and information is valuable. It helps if you're already a member of communities that are related to your site topic, but if you're not, there's no time to start like the present. If you can help people out with your knowledge or participate in debates with your opinion, and people get to know you or even respect you, they will want to see more of what you write.
2. Be original. They say there's nothing new under the sun. But, there is always a way to put a new twist on an old concept. If you have original content, people will find you. If you have something that people can't get anywhere else, then well, they will get it from you! When you've got something that is actually unique to say, other people will pick your story up and link to you. Try to find something that is truly yours, and run with it.
3. Be patient. The traffic might not come rushing in, but in time, it will grow. An older website not only has a better pagerank, but the author has had more time to write more articles and develop their style. The more articles you have, especially if they are original, the more people will find you by searching.
4. Get lucky. Sometimes, there isn't anything you can do; the dice just decide your fate for you. That's OK. Work hard at the other three steps, and maybe you will get a new wave of traffic, or maybe nothing will happen -- until, one day someone catches your story - you get Digg'd, or Slashdotted, or Stumbled Upon, or whatever. It happens to some people and it doesn't happen to others.
I get a fair, but not huge, amount of traffic on one of my other blogs, so here is my real-life example of putting these ingredients into action:
1. I'm very active on a forum targeted to my readers, not in order to increase my web traffic, but because I earnestly love my hobby (knitting). I read and learn things from others, and I contribute when I can.
2. I write informational articles garnered from my own experience, not cribbed from other sources, and I also design patterns, both for sale and free. Both drive traffic to my site. Patterns are original content, that people cannot get anywhere else, so I am providing them a service -- and if they like it, they will return and I've gained a new reader.
3. I've been blogging for more than three years, averaging at about 2-3 posts per week. That's a lot of posts - not all my content is gold, but sometimes the search engines pick up the things you'd least expect. I'm one of the only people to have written about a certain technique, so I get a good amount of traffic from that (which ties back in to original content).
4. Every once in a while I get a surge of traffic from a big site - which is great. I get a few new followers, my advertising prices shoot up, and while most of those new visitors don't stick around, at least a few will. So, ignoring the spikes, my traffic rises steadily, if slowly. And the more that these spikes happen, the more exposure you get, so it builds exponentially. Nowadays, whenever I release something new, I will get a big spike.
Hopefully you can put some of these things into action, and it will do you some good.
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Four ingredients for website traffic
April 25, 2011 blogging, search engines, website traffic, websites
Leaving Quality Comments to Help Your Blog
August 2, 2009 blogging, search engines, writing
Blog comments are key to being visible and forming relationships in the blogosphere. As a blogger, you should not remain silent. Write posts on your own blog, and seek out others to comment on. There are a number of reasons why you should leave comments on other people's blogs.
Community. Your blog does not occur in a vacuum. There are millions of bloggers out there, many of which have blogs on the same topic as yours. Get out there and introduce yourself, to build up a sense of blogging community. Say hello to your neighbors, so they will recognize you. You may even get some requests for guest posts or link exchanges.
Introducing new people to your blog. When you leave a blog comment, you're not just introducing yourself to one new blogger. You're leaving your blog's link for anyone to see. This backlink usually shows up in the form of a link on your username. So if you leave a quality comment, all the other people reading that post will be more likely to click on your link and visit your blog. It's a small way of building up traffic.
Pagerank. If the blog you're commenting on is a dofollow blog (What are nofollow and dofollow?), your comment will create a dofollow backlink that will contribute to your site's pagerank (Why is PageRank important?).
Friendliness! Bloggers are people too, usually quite personable people. Be nice to them, and perhaps you'll find a friend. Build relationships with other bloggers, not just for the benefit of your blog, but because it's a fun thing to do.
Leaving blog comments is beneficial to both bloggers. People love to receive comments on their posts, and leaving them will help your own blog. There are even groups that support people striving to up their commenting, such as the monthly comment challenges. Many blogs also display their monthly top commenters with (dofollow!) links to their blogs.
Be visible in the blogosphere, and leave quality blog comments to get your name out there and show other bloggers some love. Just make sure that the comments you leave show some thought: no one likes spam comments, or comments that just say "hey great post".
~Joy
Community. Your blog does not occur in a vacuum. There are millions of bloggers out there, many of which have blogs on the same topic as yours. Get out there and introduce yourself, to build up a sense of blogging community. Say hello to your neighbors, so they will recognize you. You may even get some requests for guest posts or link exchanges.
Introducing new people to your blog. When you leave a blog comment, you're not just introducing yourself to one new blogger. You're leaving your blog's link for anyone to see. This backlink usually shows up in the form of a link on your username. So if you leave a quality comment, all the other people reading that post will be more likely to click on your link and visit your blog. It's a small way of building up traffic.
Pagerank. If the blog you're commenting on is a dofollow blog (What are nofollow and dofollow?), your comment will create a dofollow backlink that will contribute to your site's pagerank (Why is PageRank important?).
Friendliness! Bloggers are people too, usually quite personable people. Be nice to them, and perhaps you'll find a friend. Build relationships with other bloggers, not just for the benefit of your blog, but because it's a fun thing to do.
Leaving blog comments is beneficial to both bloggers. People love to receive comments on their posts, and leaving them will help your own blog. There are even groups that support people striving to up their commenting, such as the monthly comment challenges. Many blogs also display their monthly top commenters with (dofollow!) links to their blogs.
Be visible in the blogosphere, and leave quality blog comments to get your name out there and show other bloggers some love. Just make sure that the comments you leave show some thought: no one likes spam comments, or comments that just say "hey great post".
~Joy
Understanding DoFollow and NoFollow links
July 31, 2009 blogging, search engines, websites
Start reading some blogs about blogging, and I give you about ten minutes before you read something about dofollow and nofollow relations. Dofollow and Nofollow are important concepts for website building and search engine optimization, but they can be hard to understand.
Dofollow and Nofollow are all about backlinks, and what those backlinks will do. Traditionally, a backlink will pass PageRank to the linked site. This is what rel=dofollow does. However, if for whatever reason a website owner does not wish to pass along PageRank to their link, they can use rel=nofollow.
Setting a blog's comments to nofollow discourages comment spammers, who are out looking for PageRank-passing backlinks in the form of spam comments left on popular blog posts. However, it can also discourage comments in general. People can set their comments as dofollow as an incentive to helpful commenters.
By default, Blogspot, Wordpress, and Typepad comments are nofollow. There are plugins that can change the comments to dofollow if the owner wishes. However, since many bloggers do not understand the difference between dofollow and nofollow, few people ever choose to change the default settings, so unless you see it stated that the blog is dofollow (such as You Comment - I Follow), you can assume that the blog is nofollow.
~Joy
Dofollow and Nofollow are all about backlinks, and what those backlinks will do. Traditionally, a backlink will pass PageRank to the linked site. This is what rel=dofollow does. However, if for whatever reason a website owner does not wish to pass along PageRank to their link, they can use rel=nofollow.
Setting a blog's comments to nofollow discourages comment spammers, who are out looking for PageRank-passing backlinks in the form of spam comments left on popular blog posts. However, it can also discourage comments in general. People can set their comments as dofollow as an incentive to helpful commenters.
By default, Blogspot, Wordpress, and Typepad comments are nofollow. There are plugins that can change the comments to dofollow if the owner wishes. However, since many bloggers do not understand the difference between dofollow and nofollow, few people ever choose to change the default settings, so unless you see it stated that the blog is dofollow (such as You Comment - I Follow), you can assume that the blog is nofollow.
~Joy
Google PageRank: What is it, how is it calculated, why is it important?
July 26, 2009 blogging, search engines, SEO, website traffic, websites
The word on every blogger's lips is PageRank, or PR for short. If you're new to blogging and your blog is your first website, you might not understand what PR is, or what exactly it means, or indeed why is Google Page Rank important.
In a nutshell, your page rank will help determine how high or low you fall in Google's search results. A very big, successful website will have a high PR which means that when someone does a search on Google, chances are that big, high-pagerank website will be near the top. So why is Google pagerank important? Page Rank is important because the higher your PR, the more search engine traffic you will be getting!
A note: Google PageRank is not the same as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). They both influence where a site will turn up in search results, but they are independent of each other. A search engine optimized page may not have a high pagerank, nor will a high-pagerank website necessarily be written for SEO.
Your website's Google page rank is sort of like your reputation with Google. Google knows that some sites are better than others, and this influences their results. While the exact algorithms for determining PR are top-secret, here are some of the things that go in to calculating Google PageRank:
Links. Backlinks are the most important factor for determining Google pagerank. Google assumes that if many people are talking about a page, if the page is linked to by many other websites, then it's a quality page. Think about popular sites that get spread around by sites like Digg and Reddit. Lots of people are talking about those sites, so they have a ton of backlinks. More backlinks = more PR.
The best way to get backlinks is, of course, to have quality content that gets noticed. If your page gets Dugg, or Stumbled, or Redded...it? (;), lots of people will see it and hopefully some of them will link to you on their own site. The amount of PR boost you get from a backlink depends on the PR of the site that's linking to you. So if you get a backlink from a huge site like Digg (PR8), it counts more than a link on someone's PR1 blog.
Other ways to get backlinks include commenting on blogs, participating in forums (linking your site in a post, or in your signature), and other techniques that range from kinda sneaky to downright unethical, which I won't discuss here.
Backlinks are the major influence on the calculation of Google PageRank. However, a few other things are taken into account:
Outbound Links. Links on your own site can affect your own PageRank: Namely, they can negatively impact it. If you have too many links on your page (to the tune of over 100), this will give you a penalty. Also, if you link to websites that Google has marked as shady, you may get a penalty for that as well.
Bounce Rate. Rumor has it that Google PageRank (or at least their general search engine ranking) is affected by a site's bounce rate. Bounce Rate is the percentage of visitors that leave the first page of a website without visiting any other pages. Bounce Rate is very high for blogs, and lower for other sites where more information is held on other pages. A low bounce rate (say, 40% or lower) reflects a quality site.
Age. Older sites have higher PR. Whether the age of a site is a factor in calculating PageRank, or whether it's just a reflection of more time to build pages and collect backlinks, I don't know, but if you have the choice between two domains, one which was just registered and one which is 5 years old, go with the older one for a PR boost.
Page Rank is a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest. Only the most esteemed sites get PR10, such as Apple's official site, Google Labs, and Nasa.gov.
There are a number of sites that will calculate or estimate your pagerank for you, as well as toolbars you can download. Google releases updated PR info every few months, but in reality a page's Google PageRank is always changing. So, the Google PageRank that you see might be 3 months out of date. Keep this in mind when comparing your site's PageRank with other sites.
~Joy
In a nutshell, your page rank will help determine how high or low you fall in Google's search results. A very big, successful website will have a high PR which means that when someone does a search on Google, chances are that big, high-pagerank website will be near the top. So why is Google pagerank important? Page Rank is important because the higher your PR, the more search engine traffic you will be getting!
A note: Google PageRank is not the same as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). They both influence where a site will turn up in search results, but they are independent of each other. A search engine optimized page may not have a high pagerank, nor will a high-pagerank website necessarily be written for SEO.
Your website's Google page rank is sort of like your reputation with Google. Google knows that some sites are better than others, and this influences their results. While the exact algorithms for determining PR are top-secret, here are some of the things that go in to calculating Google PageRank:
Links. Backlinks are the most important factor for determining Google pagerank. Google assumes that if many people are talking about a page, if the page is linked to by many other websites, then it's a quality page. Think about popular sites that get spread around by sites like Digg and Reddit. Lots of people are talking about those sites, so they have a ton of backlinks. More backlinks = more PR.
The best way to get backlinks is, of course, to have quality content that gets noticed. If your page gets Dugg, or Stumbled, or Redded...it? (;), lots of people will see it and hopefully some of them will link to you on their own site. The amount of PR boost you get from a backlink depends on the PR of the site that's linking to you. So if you get a backlink from a huge site like Digg (PR8), it counts more than a link on someone's PR1 blog.
Other ways to get backlinks include commenting on blogs, participating in forums (linking your site in a post, or in your signature), and other techniques that range from kinda sneaky to downright unethical, which I won't discuss here.
Backlinks are the major influence on the calculation of Google PageRank. However, a few other things are taken into account:
Outbound Links. Links on your own site can affect your own PageRank: Namely, they can negatively impact it. If you have too many links on your page (to the tune of over 100), this will give you a penalty. Also, if you link to websites that Google has marked as shady, you may get a penalty for that as well.
Bounce Rate. Rumor has it that Google PageRank (or at least their general search engine ranking) is affected by a site's bounce rate. Bounce Rate is the percentage of visitors that leave the first page of a website without visiting any other pages. Bounce Rate is very high for blogs, and lower for other sites where more information is held on other pages. A low bounce rate (say, 40% or lower) reflects a quality site.
Age. Older sites have higher PR. Whether the age of a site is a factor in calculating PageRank, or whether it's just a reflection of more time to build pages and collect backlinks, I don't know, but if you have the choice between two domains, one which was just registered and one which is 5 years old, go with the older one for a PR boost.
Page Rank is a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest. Only the most esteemed sites get PR10, such as Apple's official site, Google Labs, and Nasa.gov.
There are a number of sites that will calculate or estimate your pagerank for you, as well as toolbars you can download. Google releases updated PR info every few months, but in reality a page's Google PageRank is always changing. So, the Google PageRank that you see might be 3 months out of date. Keep this in mind when comparing your site's PageRank with other sites.
~Joy
You need Google Analytics for your website!
July 11, 2009 blogging, search engines, SEO, website traffic, websites
--Or something like Google Analytics, anyway.
Google Analytics is a free, easy-to-use method of gathering statistics on your website. You put a small piece of code into your website, and Google will start collecting data on your visitors. You will receive information on how many people are visiting, how long they are staying, what browser they are using, what search keywords or what websites they are coming from to get to your site, and much more.
Google Analytics is an extremely powerful tool, and the best thing about it is that it's totally free. I could expect to pay a high monthly fee for such a service. I have Google Analytics code installed on all four of my websites, and I'm very happy with it.
Google Analytics has a bit of a learning curve, because it's so powerful, but there are many things you can learn from the Google Analytics data. To start out simple, let's see what search engine keywords are bringing people to your website. After you have installed the code, wait a few days for Google Analytics to gather data.
Once Google Analytics has collected some visitor data for your site, scroll down to the Traffic Sources pie chart. If you have a red wedge in your chart, that's your search engine traffic. Click 'view report' and view the full keyword report.
It's very important that you know what search keywords are driving people to your website or blog. When you find out what keywords are working, you can work on making sure those keywords are used more often.
Sometimes, you will get search engine traffic from a search term that is not addressed on your site. For instance, on my knitting blog one person searched for "how to dye roving". I don't have a how-to article about dyeing roving on my blog, but it sure would be a good idea to write one! Make sure that when your readers are searching for something, they will get what they want to find. Google Analytics will help you identify what people are searching for when they come to your page.
That's just one of the ways you can use the power of Google Analytics to improve your website or blog. There are other ways too, so poke around on Google Analytics and learn something about your visitors.
~Joy
Google Analytics is a free, easy-to-use method of gathering statistics on your website. You put a small piece of code into your website, and Google will start collecting data on your visitors. You will receive information on how many people are visiting, how long they are staying, what browser they are using, what search keywords or what websites they are coming from to get to your site, and much more.
Google Analytics is an extremely powerful tool, and the best thing about it is that it's totally free. I could expect to pay a high monthly fee for such a service. I have Google Analytics code installed on all four of my websites, and I'm very happy with it.
Google Analytics has a bit of a learning curve, because it's so powerful, but there are many things you can learn from the Google Analytics data. To start out simple, let's see what search engine keywords are bringing people to your website. After you have installed the code, wait a few days for Google Analytics to gather data.
Once Google Analytics has collected some visitor data for your site, scroll down to the Traffic Sources pie chart. If you have a red wedge in your chart, that's your search engine traffic. Click 'view report' and view the full keyword report.
It's very important that you know what search keywords are driving people to your website or blog. When you find out what keywords are working, you can work on making sure those keywords are used more often.
Sometimes, you will get search engine traffic from a search term that is not addressed on your site. For instance, on my knitting blog one person searched for "how to dye roving". I don't have a how-to article about dyeing roving on my blog, but it sure would be a good idea to write one! Make sure that when your readers are searching for something, they will get what they want to find. Google Analytics will help you identify what people are searching for when they come to your page.
That's just one of the ways you can use the power of Google Analytics to improve your website or blog. There are other ways too, so poke around on Google Analytics and learn something about your visitors.
~Joy
How soon will your blog get search engine traffic?
July 9, 2009 blogging, search engines, SEO, website traffic
Websites can get a large portion of their traffic from search engines, so it's always a waiting game wondering how soon a new site will start appearing in search results. You can submit your site to the search engines, give them site maps, and ping them, but how soon will people be able to search for you?
On July 7, my book review blog This Girl's Bookshelf got its first search engine hit. The search was for Bookmooch, which I had written an article about on July 6. The blog itself is a little less than a month old.
I'm very new at trying to write search engine optimized articles, but it's encouraging that my brand new article on my brand new blog is coming up in the Google results. This Girl's Bookshelf almost certainly has a pagerank of 0 at this point, but it is showing up in Google Search.
My websites are not very strong in search engines yet. My oldest and largest blog, Joyarna Knitblog, has a PageRank of 2 but search engine traffic only accounts for about 2% of my total traffic. Most of the terms that I get search traffic from on that blog are very specific knitting phrases. I do not try to write SEO-optimized articles on my knitting blog. Instead, I just write how I would normally write.
I discovered that I got my first search engine hit by using Google Analytics, which is a powerful and important tool for anyone running a website.
I was very happy that I didn't have to wait long for my first search engine hit on my blog. Older sites do tend to do better on Google, but new sites can indeed show up in results.
~Joy
On July 7, my book review blog This Girl's Bookshelf got its first search engine hit. The search was for Bookmooch, which I had written an article about on July 6. The blog itself is a little less than a month old.
I'm very new at trying to write search engine optimized articles, but it's encouraging that my brand new article on my brand new blog is coming up in the Google results. This Girl's Bookshelf almost certainly has a pagerank of 0 at this point, but it is showing up in Google Search.
My websites are not very strong in search engines yet. My oldest and largest blog, Joyarna Knitblog, has a PageRank of 2 but search engine traffic only accounts for about 2% of my total traffic. Most of the terms that I get search traffic from on that blog are very specific knitting phrases. I do not try to write SEO-optimized articles on my knitting blog. Instead, I just write how I would normally write.
I discovered that I got my first search engine hit by using Google Analytics, which is a powerful and important tool for anyone running a website.
I was very happy that I didn't have to wait long for my first search engine hit on my blog. Older sites do tend to do better on Google, but new sites can indeed show up in results.
~Joy
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