3/30/2006

Did Martin Luther predict the blogger movement?

»The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing; every one must be an author; some out of vanity, to acquire celebrity and raise up a name, others for the sake of mere gain.« (Martin Luther, German Reformation leader, Table Talk, 1530s)

If found this quote in the entertaining list of bad predictions. This almost reads as if Martin predicted blogging in 1530: People write for the sake of vanity, to make a name for themselves or, being pro bloggers, for profit. Now, what’s so evil about this?

3/28/2006

Increasing your search engine traffic by making your site findable

If you’ve been in the website game for a little time you know that the majority of traffic for most sites comes from search engines. But there are other means to drive serious traffic to your website, as everyone who has been Slashdotted or been on the Digg frontpage can confirm. These sites drive huge numbers of people to the websites they feature, often resulting in server overload of these sites. Other ways of getting visitors are the bookmark services like del.icio.us, Spurl, BlinkList and many similar services. Tagging seems to be the in vogue way of organizing information, so a good and appropriate tagged site on Technorati or Flickr can receive nice traffic from these too.
Allthough search engines still seem to rely on linkage to determine a sites placement, there are valid reasons to believe that they also measure real traffic to a site and take this into account when calculating rankings. Why do you think Google is giving away Analytics for free? So if you can increase your traffic by getting a lot of visitors from non search engine sites, this might in turn improve your search engine rankings, creating some kind of traffic perpetuum mobile. There is also a good probability that some of these visitors have websites or blogs of their own, and if they do enjoy your content, they might link to you, providing even more Google juice. So how do you tap into this traffic power? You have to make your site as findable as possible. Here are a few ideas:

• Make your site easy to bookmark
  Many people use social bookmarking sites, but they often forget about adding a page to their bookmarks. Help them! At least provide a link to add a page to del.icio.us, which I consider the most important bookmark site, at the bottom of your pages. The code would go like this:
  <a href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=http://your_url&title=your__title">Add to del.icio.us</a>
  If you have a word press blog, you can do as I did and use the Scociable plugin, which adds icons for adding a post to almost any bookmark service at the end of the post.
• Tag like crazy
  If you have a blog, use Technorati tags a lot. Having a recent post with a popular tag can bring heaps of visitors. Be honest though and don’t use tags that don’t fit your writings. This damages your credibility, and people won’t be happy to link to you or bookmark your content. If you use wordpress, I highly recommend the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin.
• Flickr your images
  This is a great tipp I read about at Performancing: If you use pictures on your website (who doesn’t), host them on Flickr and provide good tags for them. Provide a link to your site at each of these pictures.

I suggest you try these tactics and see if they work for you. It is very likely you will see a good increase in traffic. Even if it doesn’t boost your search engine rankings (I would be surprised) it is allways good to have more happy visitors.