This traffic tip may be obvious to some of you, but I know it's not obvious to everyone. If you've been reading this blog in the last few days (of course, if you're tracking it via Technorati then good luck — Technorati thinks I last updated it 5 days ago… I thought it was just me, but I see that even Darren Rowse has the same issues) then you've seen my introduction of The Toolbar Guide as another case study, one that especially lets me show off the use of AdSense referral buttons. (And be sure to subscribe to my newsletter to get the REAL reason to use referral buttons.) This site is in much the same vein as The Invisible Fence Guide, but I'm doing some things differently with it.
I've mentioned before that the quickest way to get a site indexed is to use a blog. What I haven't done is talk about how you use that blog.
Blogs are natural traffic attractors if they're updated on a regular basis. The blog crawlers out there today — this includes crawlers from the major search engines as well as specialized blog crawlers — know that the best blogs are the ones that get updated frequently and that have a lot of comments and trackbacks. So they spend a lot of their time recrawling all the blogs they know about looking for the fresh new content that indicates a blog is active.
Some of you probably already have blogs and you can do like I did with this one and simply link to your content site from that blog. That'll get the content site into the indexes. But to get more traffic you need to take that strategy a step further and create a focused, active blog that compliments your content site.
Take, for example, the new blog that I just created called Toolbar Critic. It's a simple Blogger-based blog, nothing fancy. But it has these important characteristics:
- It links to my content site (toolbar.ericgiguere.com)
- It's on a separate domain (toolbarcritic.com)
- It's hosted on a separate server with a different IP address
The first two should be no surprise. Of course it needs to link to my content site, otherwise how will it drive traffic to it? And placing it on a separate domain is something I've always advocated, so that if (a) you change blogging software or (b) Blogger terminates your account then you still have all your content and don't have to use complicated gymnastics to recover whatever traffic stream you've developed.
Using a separate IP address, which effectively means using a separate hosting company, is probably new to some of you, but the experienced pros have known this for a long time. It's important to keep the blog and the content site independent of each other so that the search engines will treat the links from the blog to the content site as being more authoritative. Plus you'll have a start on getting PageRank for the pages on the content site.
After creating the blog, don't forget to do these important steps:
- Claim the blog at Technorati
- Register it with a bunch of blog directories
- Subscribe to the blog with your Bloglines account (or whatever news reader/aggregator) you use
These will all help both people and search engines discover your blog. (I'll talk more about these steps in a later posting.)
Once you've setup the blog, you want to update it with fresh content on a regular basis. While you're developing your content site, an easy way to create fresh content in the blog is to place extracts or summaries of the new content in separate postings, with links going back to the original pages on the content site. Spread it out over several days or weeks, of course.
After that, you'll have to remember to update the blog with other content. I don't recommend using one of those “auto blogging” software packages. I really do think you need a human element to be truly successful with this. You can certainly use things like Google Alerts to find new things to talk about, but always take the time (and, unfortunately, that's probably the one thing you'll be lacking!) to write your own content.
These steps will drive additional traffic to your site, though don't expect a huge upswing initially — it will certainly take some time.
Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google. Subscribe to his AdSense newsletter for more tips and advice on AdSense and content monetization.