The first days of my quest - Part 4

Part 1 /Part 2 / Part 3

Blogging continued...

Yesterday I started to tell you about my recent blogging activities and I promised I would give you a bit more detail today, so here we go.

I've created my first blog and my first post now I need people to read it, so it was back to google with the search terms "promote blog". After trawling through a few useless links I found this site http://www.manhattanservice.com/ it has a massive list of blog directories to submit to, each directory is listed with its Google Ranking (I will come back to this in a bit) . This site also has a list of Blog Forums also with their Google Ranking.

Directories

I went through the list of directories with the highest rankings (minimum 6) and started submitting my blog, this is quite tedious but pretty easy. Some of the directories will list you straight away, some have some kind of manual verification to make sure your site is suitable and some require you to place a reciprocal link on your site first.

Google PageRank

From Googles website, PageRank explained:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your
query.

So, what does all this mean, well to get more traffic you need people to be able to find you and one of the ways people do this is through a search engine and the higher the PageRank you have the higher you're likely to be in the search results. In order to get a higher PageRank you need to have your link listed in lots of places, but they need to be places that already have a high PageRank, thats why I only submitted my blog to directories with a minimum rank of 6.

Blogging Forums

Believe it or not most of my traffic at the moment comes from forums, especially as I'm still waiting for my blog to be listed on a lot of the directories. Forums are very different to directories in that you can't just post a link to your blog and leave it at that, you need to participate in the forum. It's probably only worth signing up to a couple of forums (links to my favourites at the end of this section) as it's very difficult to keep your blog up to date as well as posting to many forums. So, after joining a couple of forums I set up my signature with links to my blogs and started posting. I've tried to participate in the forums I've joined rather than just randomly posting links to my blog.

Blogger Forums
Blogger Talk

Memes

Getting involved in memes are another good way of increasing traffic to your blog, for a description of what a meme is and a list of ones you can do visit The Daily Meme. Doing these encourages people to come and leave comments at your site. Monday Madness is a good example of a meme that I've just started to get involved in.

Please remember though don't just get involved in forums and memes as a way to increase traffic do it because you want to get involved in the blogging community as well, don't just become a spammer.

Thanks for reading, see you tomorrow for the 5th and final part in my first days series.

Martin

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