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.

Using Image and File Attachments « WordPress Codex

This isn’t the easiest to read set of instructions – but it’s the best that’s out there for now.

If you want to attach a Microsoft Word doc (not recommended) or a PDF (recommended) to your WordPress blog- these are the steps.

• The reasons you don’t want to attach a Word Doc:
• not everyone has Word
• Word can contain viruses
• Word formatting will break depending on fonts and computer platform.

But- if you load a PDF:

• Everyone can read it with the free Acrobat reader
• Search engines will parse it
• Many people can read the PDF within their browser
• It will look exactly the same on every machine
• It can have fields in it to fill out on the computer

I hope to put a simple step-by-step how to upload PDF’s to your WordPress blog soon. For now- the codex link at top is the best I could find.

Canvas for WordPress

This plug-in begs for more exploration- a theme creating and managing plug-in that requires no knowledge of PHP or CSS. Computers are supposed to make things easier- and shouldn’t require users to have to learn some arcane language like HTML to make them do what we want. This set of tools utilizing AJAX and Java might just be the trick.

In case you haven’t noticed- if I find something cool- and don’t have time to check it out fully- I just “Press-it” to this site- and come back and explore and add info to the post as it comes in. If you have some experience with Canvas- please add comments.

thanks!