Search Engines || Information Architecture

Spotted via LifeHacker is this post on how to increase traffic to your blog.

The 3 techniques mentioned there are:

1. Technorati tags. Ok this one is good but not always a valid ideea. It depends on how you formulate your tags and your field of blogging. Not all subjects/tags receive the same traffic and you have to research a lot in order to have maximum profit. Why tags are important:

• some of them are closely monitored through RSS feeds by a lot of people and you get instant traffic after publishing a post.
• due to the fact that Technorati site is extremely SEF they score well on Google (some may argue that this is because of their partnership with Google Adsense but that’s another story).
• Technorati links are clean, without condoms. They might help you as external links. So choose carefully your post’s titles.

2. Feedburner headline animator. Blablabla. Not a bad ideea but for sure not a great one. Instead or complementary you can use personal content aggregators.

3. Trackbacks. A good point if used properly:

• When writing a post check Technorati for others that have approached the same subject. Look for those with many incoming links, they will get you the traffic you want. This is the technique that Techcrunch used on the early posts and now is on the A-List. Best way to do this: Write your post and at the end make a section like “Additional infos” where you put apx 3-5 external links. Don’t forget to send the trackbacks
• Look for those blogs that put trackbacks above regular comments or react fast to market trends.
• Don’t be an idiot. Don’t just write smthg like “X has said this” and send the trackback. Bring your personal view into the post

Beside those above you can use the following too:

• Comments. Comment as much as you can but again avoid being an idiot. Try developing a relationship with the bloggers you are commenting on. Identify valuable posts as on trackbacks
• Use social bookmarking sites for SEO and organic traffic. Barry Schwartz used to do that on Yahoo’s MyWeb but there are at least 5-10 valuable ones. Properly tag your posts of course.
• Inspired by the original post: Use a mischivieng title like “Three simple actions that doubled my website traffic in 30 days” . I say that because it may take longer than 30 days but what a hell we are the fast-food/fast-fuck generation and we want to believe is possible. And….it only applies to blogs not to all websites (static ones for examples). If you have a static website though, you can create a blogger account and you can deploy that blog on a directory or a subdomain of your main site.
• Use all the Google Publisher Tools available, especially Google Analytics.