Cameron Olthuis

Just because you have a blog doesn’t mean anyone knows about it or reads it. Like any other website, you still need do some promotion to drive traffic. Otherwise you’re just a needle in the haystack. Here’s a few things you can do start bringing people to your blog.

1) Submit your blog to both traditonal and blog search engines, and ping them everytime you write a new post. For this I use Ping-o-Matic.

2) Post useful comments on other related blogs. This really does generate good traffic. I often click the links of others that have left comments on the blogs I read regularly. I also visit the sites of every single person who leaves a comment on this site, and have come across so many great blogs this way.

3) If you have a lot to say about another blog post try writing about it on your site instead of leaving a comment. But make sure you leave a trackback link. I also read all the trackbacks on my site and can guarantee every other blogger does too. Of course we want to know what others have to say about our posts. Do this everytime you quote or refer to a blog.

4) Make sure you have a RSS feed that people can subscribe to. This will help others keep track of your blog. Very important for repeat visitors. Don’t forget to subscribe to my feed.

5) Post often when you first start your blog. As time goes on you don’t have to post everyday but try not to ever go longer than a week without posting. Your blog will start looking like a ghost town and your visitors won’t want to come back if you don’t update it on a regular basis.

6) Write high-quality posts. They don’t have to be long but they need to be good. Give a unique view of your opinions. Try writing something that will create a buzz and get other bloggers to talk and link about your posts. Ever you ever write something good enough to get on Digg that alone will bring in 30,000 visitors and a few thousand links to your site.

Don’t give up. It’s hard to build an audience and takes a lot of time and effort. It won’t happen over night, unless you’re already somewhat of a celebrity. Stick with it, if you write unique content eventually you will build a good following.

Blogging, Blog

I may be the only SEO that doesn’t buy into the myth that your PageRank (PR) gets passed out by linking to other websites. It’s a stupid myth that I’ve never believed. Seriously, do you really think your PageRank gets distributed when you link to another website? Sillyness!

If you link to other people your PageRank does not get passed out, in other words the PR on your site is not lowered if you link to other people. There’s a difference to passing authority and passing PR. Passing authority simply means that your site, which we hope has some authority is passing on some love to the site you’re linking to. You’re giving the site a vote of confidence, which turns into PR for them, but it’s not at the expense of your own PageRank.

I think this where the common misconception lies (from the original Google research pape)…

The PageRank given to Page A by a Page B pointing to it is decreased
with each link to anywhere that exists on Page B. That means a page’s
PageRank is essentially a measure of its vote; it can split that vote
between one link or two links or many more, but its overall voting
power will always be the same.

It doesn’t say that the PR of site B is lowered which each link it gives out. It basically says the more sites that site B links to the less PageRank each of those sites gets.

So stop being a link nazi and spread the link love. If anything this will only help you, not hurt you. Some people are going so far as to putting no follow tags on their own inbound links, this is ridiculous.

Feel free to agree or disagree.

SEO, Links, PageRank

Of course they can. But I want to point you to a very good debate between Jason Calacanis and Alan Meckler.

Jason is arguing that bloggers can make a decent living and Alan doesn’t think they can. The one thing they do seem to agree on is that it takes a decent amount of traffic before that’s possible.

My Take is that you can make money from blogging. But I don’t think that’s the reason 95% of people blog in the first place. There’s a hundred other reasons someone start blogging besides making money, a hobby being one of them. I will agree though, if you do want to make money it will take a lot of traffic before you can replace your daytime job.

There’s a lot of things that you can get from blogging besides getting rich. The networking and contacts I’ve made through my blog alone have been priceless, and I’ve only just scratched the surface.

So who wins they debate? I vote it’s a tie. It’s true that if you want to make money blogging you can, but for the majority that will never happen. I agree with Jason that the industry is still young and ad dollars that go towards blogs is only going to increase. With that the number of people making a living off blogging will go up as well. If you do want to make money from blogging it’s possible, but like anything be prepared for lots of hard work. Let’s not forget the money a person can make indirectly from blogging as well. I’m sure Alan wouldn’t write a blog if it wasn’t tied to making money somehow, I guarantee he doesn’t do it for fun.

Blog, Blogging

This entry isn’t about optimizing for blog search engines, it’s about using blog search engines as a powerful tool for your SEO. We all know that link building is an important part of SEO, some say the most important part. If you start optimizing for blog SE’s and using them as link building tools you’ll start building the right kind of links, natural ones.

Tonight I attented a search engine optimization meet for the San Diego SEO group. It’s the first one I’ve been to since I moved here. It was a good mix of beginner and advanced SEO’s, which makes the questions and conversations great. If you live in the area you should consider coming out. Anyways, we talked a lot about blogs and blog search engines tonight and I wanted to add to a point I’d made during the meet.

Blog engines are a great way to build links. If you write a blog, either personal or business related, you need to start learning and focusing on optimizing for blog SE’s. The reason this works so well is because of the people using theses engines, which just happen to be bloggers themselves, the kind of people you want reading your blog, provided you write good stuff.

If other bloggers come across your site, and like what you say, chances are they will link to you either now or maybe sometime in the future. And these are the exact type of links you want, natural links. They’re natural because people are linking to you on their own free will, without you directly asking. These are the best kind of links you can have, authorative sites throwing your link inside great content. You also get a lot of traffic from these links.

Some great things you should keep in mind for optimizing for blog search engines…

1) Make sure you ping all the engines everytime you write something new. This tells them you have fresh new content. Now that they know you have new content the’ll spider your site and index it.

2) Technorati tags. I’ve just recently started using Technorati tags on my SEO related entries and I’ve actually noticed a fair amount of traffic coming from Technorati ,. Maybe 10-20 people with each new entry, but this traffic is targeted those 10-20 people are all you need. And that number will just continue to go up with the popularity of blogs.

3) Add links at the bottom of your post that let’s your readers submit you to Digg, Delicious, or Blinklist.

4) Write good content others will link to. This is the most important of all. If your content sucks then all this is a waste of time, because no one will link to you anyways. Write good, unique content that others both enjoy and find useful and you’ll start building links at a rapid pace. This is also called “link baiting”, one of the best ways of link building.

5) Continue learning how these blog search engines work and how to best optimize for them. I don’t pretend to know everything, there’s a lot of good information out there on this subject so keep researching. Google is your friend.

SEO, Blog, Blogging

I’ve tried explaining what RSS (feeds) is and I can tell you it’s no easy task. So thanks to Paul Stamatiou for pointing us to The unified feed theory which explains RSS in a way that’s simple and easy to understand, even if you are computer illerate.

A “feed” is a way of syndicating almost any type of content (be it articles, essays, plain or rich text, images, audio, or video) in a simple and portable way. Feeds are generally used to distribute frequently updated content, such as news and notifications. An example of this would be CNNs feeds, which provide headline feeds on various topics to keep their readers up-to-date with news.

Many people who have many Web sites they visit regularly, use feeds to be notified of these updates rather than visiting hundreds of Web sites each day.

I think it’s important to simply exactly what RSS means for the masses, especially if it’s going to play a major role in the future of the web. Thanks to Colin for making it easy.

Paul also has a great tutorial on Getting Started with RSS. He’ll walk you through what RSS is, why you should use it, and how to get started using it.

If you aren’t already using RSS I suggest you read these articles and get yourself started. Then come back and grab my feed.

RSS