JJ’s Ten Tips for Increasing Your Blog Traffic

I got the idea for this list while reading through a classic post from Samantha Burns titled Sam's 10 Commandments of Blogging. Sam's advice could help you earn a better reputation in the blogosphere... My advice is a little different.

I just want to help stat whores like myself increase their blog traffic. I can't guarantee you'll get more people to actually read your blog, but you will get more hits.

1. Write about things people are interested in.
   I know you want to write about your home improvement project or your children or your pets and that's perfectly fine. But there are millions of people out there who just want to read about sex, celebrities, and celebrities having sex. At least make passing references to celebrities or sports stars on occasion. Web surfers will love you for it. You won't believe how many hits I get every single day from people searching for Britney Spears' twat.
2. Post pictures - lots of them.
   And make sure to include descriptive alt and title tags. That helps search engines index your pictures. I'm getting several hundred hits per day from Google image searches. Obviously, it helps that I'm posting pics of Anne Hathaway's nipples, pubic hairstyles, and camel toes.
3. Join blog traffic sites like BlogMad and BlogExplosion.
   Here's how it works: You log in and surf blogs. The more blogs you surf, the more times your site appears when other bloggers are surfing. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. (I wonder how many times can I use the words blog and surf in one paragraph...)
4. Leave comments on other blogs.
   As you surf BlogMad, be generous with comments - but don't spam anyone by leaving pointless comments that are unrelated to the topic. Read at least a little of the latest entry on a blog. If it's halfway decent, leave a comment about that topic. They'll probably check out your site to learn more about the mystery commenter (you), and their regular readers might check you out too.
5. Be generous with your blogroll.
   When you come across a site that you find moderately interesting, link to it. A lot of bloggers regularly check wholinkstome and Technorati (aka an Egorati search). They'll see you linked to them, read your latest entry, and they may link to you out of courtesy. If your blogroll starts getting out of control, you can put it on a separate page.
6. Tell your friends about your blog.
   I'm not necessarily talking about co-workers. I'm talking about the kind of friends who might actually be interested in your daily bullshit. And if you write about something that happened to you and your friends, email them the link - especially if the story involves naked lesbians. Everyone loves a good naked lesbian story.
7. Join social networking sites like MySpace and YouTube.
   Whore yourself out online. All you have to do is create a profile, upload a little content, link to your blog, and add your readers to your "friends" list.
8. Allow readers to Subscribe to your blog.
   I use FeedBlitz for this (at the top of my sidebar). Readers enter their email address and they get an automatic email every day that your site is updated. People can also subscribe by adding your site to their feed reader. Just add a link to your RSS or Atom feed on your sidebar.
9. Connect with your regular readers.
   Don't be shy. If someone visits your site regularly and leaves comments, they probably would be happy to get an email from you. Again, don't spam anyone. Just send a little note like "Hey, thanks for stopping by my site. Hope you're doing well." Or even better, you can reference something they wrote about recently on their site. It will either open a line of communication with a potential new friend - or they'll want to retain their privacy and they'll ignore your email. No biggie.
10. Ask successful bloggers for advice.
    People who have been in the blogging game for a while are usually very happy to share some advice on web design or writing, etc. I've gotten some great tips over the years from fellow bloggers like Mojotek, MacBros, Jackie, Diane, Sam, Sar, and Franky. I know that's a long list, but I really do ask for a lot of advice.

Egorati and Who Links to Me

Bloggers are self-centered attention whores. Why else would they post their opinions online for all to see, allow people to leave comments, and run searches to see which other sites are linking to them?

I know it sounds like I'm in attack mode today, but the truth is I'm one of the worst offenders. In fact, I'm going to help feed your addiction.

• First up - Egorati:

It's a term bloggers invented for searching Technorati to find out who links to your site.

I run an egorati search at least once a week. If I get a new linkback, I'll check out the site, read a couple of posts, and leave a comment thanking them for the linkback. If like the site, I'll return the favor by linking them on my links page.

Go to Technorati and enter in your web address. Here's my egorati.

• Next - Who links to me:

This is the same concept as egorati, except it'll also show you your Google page rank. The higher your page rank, the better your placement in search results. The best way to increase your page rank is to get popular sites to link you. Go to wholinkstome and enter your web address. Here's my wholinkstome search.

• Next up - Google:

Everyone's favorite search engine. While Technorati and wholinkstome cater to bloggers, Google indexes nearly every site on the net. This will help you find out if a non-blog site links to you. Go to Google and enter link:(your web address). Here's my Google linkback search.

• And finally - Statcounter:

A lot of bloggers put counters on their site to see how many hits they get each day. I recommend Statcounter. You can hide the counter, you can check to see where people found your site, and it's free!

Go to Statcounter and sign up for an account. You'll have to put a bit of code in your template to track hits. When you're creating the code, you can choose to have it hidden so no one will see that you're only getting 10 hits a day - or you can choose to have a cool looking statcounter displayed on your page. I've chosen to hide mine, which is why I'm not putting a link to it here. What can I say? I'm shy.

Get Google to Notice You

Someone who has my utmost respect recently asked for a bit of advice. I was terribly flattered.

The question: What's the best/easiest/free way to get Google to list your website in search results for topics you write about?

Here's my response (via e-mail):

Actually, I just resolved my battle with Google. I was banned for a couple of months because I cheated. I don't want to bog you down with the details of that - but just know that if you cheat, you get dropped.

So I cleaned up my site and the Google spiders are crawling it again (that's a good thing). That means Google recognizes that my site is valid and that their automated computers are looking at it daily and indexing it for keywords.

Anyway - back on track now....

The easiest way to get indexed in the first place is to ping your site. Pinging = sending a notification to web trackers to let them know you've updated your page. I ping my site every time I post something new.

Best pinging site:
http://www.pingoat.com/

Type in the name of your site and the URL. You can ignore the XML feed thing. Click all three categories to select all services. Then click "go pingoat."

After that, you can bookmark the resulting page. That way it'll remember your choices for next time.

Google, Yahoo, MSNSearch, etc all have their own spider/webcrawlers. Those spiders regularly check indexing sites like technorati.com or blogrolling.com . Pingoat notifies those indexing sites that you've updated your shit and Google et al will find out via technorati et al. Capische?

So that should do it. Within a couple of weeks, you'll be popping up in search engines. The more you ping (whenever you write a new post), the more keywords get indexed.

Now... if you really want to speed up the process...

All search engines monitor Google, which leads the pack. So if you can prod Google to list your site sooner than later, you'll start seeing search engine traffic a bit sooner.

You can do that here:
http://www.google.com/addurl.html

It's super easy. Just enter your website's URL then enter the verification code and submit. You can put the name of your site in the comments field if you'd like.

And if you want tips on increasing your keyword success, you can read about that here:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

Holy fucking shit - this is a long email.

Can you tell I'm a great big dork and I like talking about this shit? Sorry! Maybe I'll post this on The Churning sometime. I bet others would like to know as well.

Rock on!
JJ

I've got nothing to hide here. Yes, I'm a great big dork.

So there was a follow-up question about keywords. Should a blogger place specific keywords on their site anywhere? That's where I got fucked - TWICE. But I didn't go into the details in my email (Ha! That rhymes!).

First, I cheated by hiding keywords in posts by making them the same color as the background. That's a big no no. I learned the hard way. Yeah I was BANNED. Remember, I'm still new at this. It hasn't even been a year yet.

Next, I fucked up by putting a meta keyword tag in my header. You'll know what this is if you've done it. If you don't, then you're fine. But what I learned through experience is that Google hates repetitive keywords in the meta keyword tag. I fucked up. BANNED again! I had keywords for some of my most popular posts in the header (i.e. JackEBrown, shit euphemisms, indie yuppie quiz, etc). But, the problem is, those are old posts that you'd have to search for or dig around in the archives to find. Hence, having those keywords on my home page makes them seem irrelevant. The Google spiders noticed and gave me the axe. I just corrected that issue a few weeks ago.

Again, I didn't get into all that in my e-mail. Here's my response:

Don't worry about keywords. You can enter Technorati tags to get better rankings on Technorati, but that won't lead to many hits at all, and the tags won't help Google one bit. It's way more trouble than it's worth (in my opinion).

The great thing about blogging is that keywords are just part of writing posts. Like if you had a website where you sold bicycles and the main page is just a bunch of pictures of bicycles and their brand names, then you'd have to worry about creatively placing keywords in there.

But with blogs, you're writing new entries constantly and each of those entries is indexed by the search engines. That's a ton of keywords every day, just because you're writing.

I know some of you may want to dispute my comment about Technorati tags. That's fine. I don't use them, but I totally respect what Technorati does for bloggers. It's a great service. I mainly use it to find out who links to me. I just choose not to tag my posts for them.

Anyway, I hope this info helps a few people out there. Enjoy.

Oh yeah - you guys have any other tips?