Seth’s Blog: How to get traffic for your blog.One of the things every blogger thinks they want is a lot of traffic. However, traffic, for traffic’s sake won’t help you grow your business- unless you are part of some google adsense pyramid scheme.

So- Seth Godin, the mack daddy of bloggers, has this post with “54 ways to build traffic to your blog” listed. Take a look- and of course realize that it’s really only 27 since almost everything he lists- also lists the opposite.

From my experience, the most important thing is to be quick to write about a subject that is fresh. Be the first, break the news, provide insight on something that just hit big in the media. For political bloggers- this is easy- for those of you writing about the latest news in local video production- it’s a little harder.

Always, stay on topic- and if you are using WordPress, think hard about your categories and use them (making sure you give each category description text in your manage/categories screen) on every post. Each post should fall into several categories.

Also- always make sure you alt tag your images- and links- with descriptions that blind people and search bots can understand. One site with content everyone was looking for was getting no hits- all because they didn’t have alt tags on their photos describing what the photos showed.

Seth is always interesting- too bad he’s closed comments and trackbacks- so I won’t get any hits from his traffic- oh, yeah- that’s another way to build traffic.

Never mind mapping the human genome, or even the PC- or the Internet- two technologies from the Internet may be the key says Kevin Kelly in a New York Times Sunday Magazine article called “Scan this book!”

The link and the tag may be two of the most important inventions of the last 50 years. They get their initial wave of power when we first code them into bits of text, but their real transformative energies fire up as ordinary users click on them in the course of everyday Web surfing, unaware that each humdrum click “votes” on a link, elevating its rank of relevance. You may think you are just browsing, casually inspecting this paragraph or that page, but in fact you are anonymously marking up the Web with bread crumbs of attention. These bits of interest are gathered and analyzed by search engines in order to strengthen the relationship between the end points of every link and the connections suggested by each tag. This is a type of intelligence common on the Web, but previously foreign to the world of books.

Not only does this explain search engine algorithms well- it makes you realize how over time- the collective intelligence of the planet will all connect.

Another interesting point Kelly makes, is that the model of mass producing “Atoms” of “bits” is going down the tubes- atoms being the paper, film or CD’s we make from our digital files for sale- all started as data- and should remain such:

As copies have been dethroned, the economic model built on them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies lose value. They are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connection and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer and engage a work.

Blogs/sites are an excellent way to build your relationships, links and connections- and share your knowledge. The Blogosopher Seminar explains this.

Optimizing your content for search is really about optimizing your content for value:

search has a “transformative purpose,” adding new social value to what it searches. What search uncovers is not just keywords but also the inherent value of connection. While almost every artist recognizes that the value of a creation ultimately rests in the value he or she personally gets from creating it (and for a few artists that value is sufficient), it is also true that the value of any work is increased the more it is shared. The technology of search maximizes the value of a creative work by allowing a billion new connections into it, often a billion new connections that were previously inconceivable.

Kevin Kelly is the “senior maverick” at Wired magazine and author of “Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World”.

I’ve been reading “Wired” for a long time now- and find it the most valuable publication I receive. It’s the only magazine I read cover to cover- every month. I can’t recommend it to my budding blogosophers enough.

http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2005/12/12/the-problems-with-tags-and-tagging/

One thing I haven’t gone into depth on in the seminar is tagging. The article link above will explain tags.

There is a bit of debate in the WordPress community about tags and categories right now, and to many of you it doesn’t matter.

I look at Categories as ways to organize your content- in a true relational way, so that you don’t have to put duplicate info in different places.

I look at tags as frequently searched keywords- that can be a category, or be in a category. While tags can help you increase your search results- and group you with others who are writing about the same subject- categories can help bring more readers in by collecting lots of keyword dense posts.

Tags are a lot like going to the Yellow Pages looking for plumbers- you get to the heading and all the competition are listed together. Categories are more like standing around with a bunch of friends asking which plumber to use- and them all saying use Bob. Bob can have a listing in the Yellow Pages too, but finding Bob because he has the most content in the category you are looking for on the web, ie. “drain cleaning in Dayton OH” makes Bob more likely to have your attention in a search.

There are a lot of different tagging solutions out there. I will try to write more about this soon.