How Do People Find Your Blog?
If your goal is to increase your website traffic as well as your blog traffic, the primary question you
need to ask yourself is, how do people get to our blogs in the first place? Understanding how people find your blog will help us better understand how to use technology to increase your visibility.
So, how do people find out about us?
- Someone else’s website
– Someone – friend, colleague, or stranger – knows about your site and
is linking to it from her website. If you are just starting out, and
you have lots of friends, this is probably where much of your traffic
is coming from. - Google or other search engines – The search engines spider the
world wide web looking for sites and indexing them. Somehow they found
you and have your site in their index. Someone has made a search on one
of the search engines and has found your site in the search results.
The longer your site has been around, and the more other sites link to
it, the higher your site will be placed in the search results and the
more people will be able to find your site that way. - You’re bookmarked – Okay, maybe this isn’t how someone found you
in the first place, but it might be the way they find you the second
time. If you change your URL structure, the directories or path names
to your blog entry, you will invalidate all those bookmarked pages on
the sites of readers who want to come back to visit again. The longer
your blog is around, and the more popular, the bigger an issue this
becomes. - Newsfeeds – Newsfeed readers such as Bloglines, MyYahoo, and Personalized Google
promote popular and/or interesting feeds. You can make it easier for
your readers to add your site to their favorite newsfeed reader,
increasing your chance of being one of the more popular feeds. - Social bookmarking tools – Social bookmarking tools such as Del.icio.us, Digg, Stumbleupon keep track of what people link to, and then highlight the most highly linked posts.
- Someone emailed your URL to someone else – You can help this along by providing an “send to friend” form on your blog.
- Press – If you get picked up in a story in print media, that can
bring lots of people to your site, especially if that print media also
has an online presence. Want press? Find out what journalists are
covering your space and send polite emails of introduction, offering to
be a resource for any article they might want to write concerning blogs.
These are some of the obvious ones we have seen over the past few years. If you know of other effective ways to get the word out about your blog we would welcome your comments.
