Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Last August I began a serious effort to try to increase the traffic to my blog, after switching from Radio (where it had been for three years) to WordPress.  Since then, I've gone from an average of 216 visitors per day, to 3400.  March was the first month I had more than 100,000 visits, and over a half million hits.  At Barcamp Ottawa, on Saturday, several people asked about this, and I promised to put together a "How to" post.  I have to give credit where credit is due. Many of these I learned from the king of blog optimization, Randy Morin, at KbCafe.  His Besting Adwords blog is excellent, and while it is mostly about how to increase your ad revenues, a good chunk of it is about how to drive traffic to your site. The majority of my traffic comes from Google.  I optimize my site for Google searchability:

1. Optimize your page count.  Google ranks sites with lots of pages as having more authority than sites with few pages.  Use WordPress, or another blogging tool, which exposes all of your posts as individual pages to the Google crawler bots.  You can find out how many pages Google sees on your blog using the "site:" query.  site:saunderslog.com says I have around 40,000 pages indexed.  Note: I have not got 40,000 posts, but because of the way that WordPress works, one post can appear as a result of many different search queries by the bot.
2. Use a Google Sitemap.  Again, this is easy to do with WordPress.  Arne Brachhold has written a great little plugin which re-constructs your sitemap each and every time you post. 
3. Make sure every post has a title.  I used to write like Dave Winer, and Doc Searls — the stream of consciousness approach. No title, just thoughts as they come to me. Unfortunately, Google looks at the title of the page for information about the post.  No title, no info.  At Randy's suggestion, I also changed the format of the title.  By default, Wordpress titles posts "blogname > title".  I reversed the order to "title — blogname", reasoning that it might be more important to have the actual topic of the post come first.
4. Make the titles eye-catching!  Newspaper editors learned long ago that a catchy headline caused people to read the article.  The same is true of bloggers.
5. Link and trackback to others.  The point of blogging is to have a conversation.  Make sure you're having conversations, then.  Others will link to you if you participate in the conversation and link to them.  Since Google ranks sites with more links more highly than sites with few links, this increases your importance to the search engine.  You can find out how many pages link to your site with the Google "link:" query.  link:saunderslog.com says I have 721 inbound links.
6. Make sure you have a top level domain.  Buying http://saunderslog.com/ increased my traffic dramatically over being http://radio.weblogs.com/0111520.  URL redirection, which is a common strategy to use a top level domain, defeats the benefit.  Google indexes the host domain itself, and not all the redirected URLs. 

Be a blogger.

1. Write frequently.  My friend Andy Abramson says that you need to post at least three times daily.  If you have enough content that you can write three times a day, do it.  If it's just once a day, then do that.  But make sure it's regular.  From personal experience, my traffic drops dramatically on days when I don't post.
2. Participate in the conversation the blogosphere is having.  I am not suggesting that you artificially write about stuff you don't care about.  I am suggesting that you find out where the conversation you do care about is happening, and then comment and write.  For me, that means tech.memeorandum.com, and pulverati.com.
3. Write meaty posts.  I had an interesting conversation with Gabe Rivera, the creator of Memeorandum, some time ago.  I asked how Memeorandum did it's magic — picking the good stuff from the other stuff.  One of the things he told me is that it looks at the length of the post.  It's biased toward posts that provide a lot of information, just like a human being would find value in a post with lots of information.  Writing meaty posts is good practice, and not just to get noticed by Memeorandum.
4. When you write something really good, send an email to your favorite bloggers and point it out to them. Many will have something to say, or will want to comment on what you've written.  They may not see it for a day or two unless you point it out.
5. Comment on other's blogs.  It gets you known, and gets you onto the radar of other bloggers.  Some blogs, like mine, also provide a link back to your blog when you comment.  It's an added incentive for you to comment.  Write a comment, get a link. Wordpress, by default, turns this off in order to fight comment spam, but I use a plugin called Follow URL to turn it back on. 
6. When you update your blog, ping.  That lets the other engines and indexes in the blogosphere know you have new stuff.  Wordpress makes this easy, by automatically pinging whichever ping engine you care about.  I personally use Pingoat.  http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2.
7. Keep a blogroll.  I know, blogrolls are passe today.  But every blog on your blogroll is a link to someone else that you're passing the love to, and helping to increase their rank in Google.  I had my blogroll turned off for a while.  When I turned it back on, I saw an immediate jump in the number of inbound links I had, as people responded in kind.

Tag every post. 

1. Technorati, and De.licio.us have made tagging one of the most important tools in the bloggers kitbag.  Tag every post, and then ping technorati to let others know you have updated.  Scan technorati to find out what other bloggers are using as tags, and use the same tags.
2. Get the most from your tags by modifying your template to better leverage them.  I use a WordPress Plugin called Jeromes Keywords.  I have it set up to automatically create technorati keywords and send them to technorati when I create a post.  It also automatically creates keyword headers for every post I write, and a master keyword header for my main page with all the keywords for that page.  Now, many search engines ignore keywords today, but this is a freebie as a result of using Jeromes Keywords.

Questions?  Feel free to drop me an email.

The Top 7 Macro Trends in Internal Communications is a piece documenting seven trends which are changing the way the workplace communications.  Some quotes:

On the democratization of communication: "Technology has transformed the world of internal communications. Information is no longer a precious resource but a widely held commodity.  With access to email, wikis and blogs, any (wired) employee can create, comment on, contradict or even undermine any formal internal communications."

On simplicity: "Internal communicators have a new role to play in reducing information overload and advocating simplicity. The introduction of new communications channels has, in many cases, not replaced previous channels but simply added to the overall volume of
communications.  In addition, the demographic transition from Baby Boomers to Gens X and Y is creating demand for more concise and compelling communications for the ‘MTV generation.’ "

With reference to IM: "Today, in the US, more than half the workforce uses instant messaging at work."

It seems that internal communicators are struggling with the same issues that all communicators have.  How can you break through the noise in our daily lives, and engage your target audience?  And, in the case of internal communications, how can you do that without resorting to Dilbert-ian techniques? 

I did something this morning which I haven’t done before, and which I have said in the past that I wouldn’t.  I deleted several posts from this site.  The posts in question concerned a specific individual’s business. Some time ago, I wrote an uncomplimentary opinion about some aspects of the way this business was being marketed.  The response was a flurry of emails and comments threatening legal action for defamation. 

Besides being opinionated, I’m stubborn too.  I consulted some lawyers I know, determined that there was no case against me, ignored the threats, and let the whole thing play out.  Others emerged from the blogosphere, including someone purporting to be a former girlfriend, and another purporting to be a former landlady with outrageous things to say about this person.  He responded in kind, and the whole thing took on a surreal and unbelievable twist. It was as if I had the Jerry Springer show going on in my blog comments — trashy, larger than life, and completely over the top.

Last night, I received a piece of email which included these two sentences:

What I kindly propose is that you pull all references to me off your blog, it is doing great harm to me… I also would like to meet with you the next time you are in the area, and have you actually learn about who I am.