Blogging Thoughts - Does Traffic Matter?

The key purpose when I started this was to get an understanding of blogging. I'm far from there, but one of the issues that I have raised and still seems to be an issue for lots of bloggers is the one about who's reading the blog and getting more readers. Wherever you look there is advice for how to increase traffic. Technorati gives ratings for blogs. My Technorati authority is 1 (0 is the lowest) and my rank is 2,202,298. Such rankings certainly increase some people's interest in increasing traffic and raising their ratings. Here are a couple examples of blogs that post about how to increase rankings. The first is more like my blog - someone who is blogging and learning. The other two look more like professional blogs with lots of ads, etc.



From UPC, a personal tech blog, comes this advice:

18 Ways You Can Help My Blog [Of course you could turn that around to help your own blog]

Today, for some reason I've been imagining all of my visitors and readers as very kind and generous souls. So, in order to take advantage of this possibly true fact about all of you, I decided to compile a list of things you could do to help me and my blog. I know, you have already read thousands of posts about how to promote and help your blog, but this one is about helping my blog. As a semi-new blogger I am still spending a lot of time establishing myself, and you can help me out! As you read through this list you might be thinking, "hey, I wouldn't mind some help myself!" - if that's the case, feel free to take my list, expand upon it, customize it, and post it on your own blog. Of course, if you do use my list, I'd appreciate if you...

1. Post this list to your blog, and link back here telling everyone where you got the original list! Come back here and comment that you've used my list, and I'll come check out your entry and help your blog too. [And so I'm doing his first suggestion]

2. Give me a thumbs-up on your StumbleUpon toolbar.

3. Vote for me at FuelMyBlog.com.

4. Add me to your links page or blogroll.

5. Click this redirect to visit my site through Alexa.com (it helps to boost my Alexa ranking).

6. Comment on something I've written.

7. Add me to your Technorati favorites.

8. Give me some constructive critiCism.

9. Subscribe to my feed, or subscribe by email.

10. Ask me a tech question (so I can blog it), or suggest a tech topic for me to write about.

11. Vote for me at the Blog For A Year contest.

12. Visit 25 Peeps, and click on my picture (if you don't know what I look like, check out the "About" section of this site).

13. Bookmark an entry you like at del.icio.us.

14. Interview me for your blog.

15. Digg an entry you like.

16. Send me cash so I can buy pay-per-click advertisements.

17. Join my community on MyBlogLog.

18. Comment on this post with more ways in which people can help promote my blog.

Doshdosh offers 20 ways to increase your Alexa rating (and tells you what an Alexa rating is) Here are the first few to get an idea:

1. Install the Alexa toolbar or Firefox’s SearchStatus extension and set your blog as your homepage. This is the most basic step.
2. Put up an Alexa rank widget on your website. I did this a few days ago and receive a fair amount of clicks every day. According to some, each click counts as a visit even if the toolbar is not used by the visitor.
3. Encourage others to use the Alexa toolbar. This includes friends, fellow webmasters as well as site visitors/blog readers. Be sure to link to Alexa’s full explanation of their toolbar and tracking system so your readers know what installing the toolbar or extension entails.
4. Work in an Office or own a company? Get the Alexa toolbar or SS Firefox extension installed on all computers and set your website as the homepage for all browsers. Perhaps it will be useful to note that this may work only when dynamic or different IPs are used.
5. Get friends to review and rate your Alexa website profile. Not entirely sure of its impact on rankings but it might help in some way.
6. Write or Blog about Alexa. Webmaster and bloggers love to hear about ways to increase their Alexa rank. They’ll link to you and send you targeted traffic (i.e. visitors with the toolbar already installed). This gradually has effects on your Alexa ranking.
7. Flaunt your URL in webmaster forums. Webmasters usually have the toolbar installed. You’ll get webmasters to visit your website and offer useful feedback. It’s also a good way to give back to the community if you have useful articles to share with others.

Betabloggerfordummies gives lots of advice including this. If I understand it correctly - that he is saying to hide links in icons - I'd say this is a little deceptive.

Here is another viral idea to increase your Page Rank. Viral link building is a technique to increase backlinks to your site at an exponential rate thus increasing your blog Page Rank. This in turn will increase traffic to your blog.........

This scheme has been introduced by Ilker Yoldas from The Thinking Blog. He uses the ALT tags inside image links to increase page relevance. The keywords placed inside image links in ALT tags increase the value of the link due to the weightage given to these tags by search engine spiders.

I'm having real doubts about all this rush for traffic. Traffic doesn't matter if people don't stay and read anything. But I'm looking through these ideas to see if I can find ways to let people who might be interested find me. Of course, that's what search engines are for, and I seem to be showing up on the first page of some Google searches that get people to my site. Today for example someone got to me googling "Anchorage Airport Railroad Depot."

I guess it depends on why you're blogging. I'm just enjoying the chance to keep friends up to date on what I'm doing - especially my mother, especially when we're traveling - and it's a way to keep me doing some writing most days. So I guess a good question to other bloggers is why are you blogging and why is traffic important to you?