Let’s go with the assumption that you don’t know why you blog or you’re just not sure. But now that you have heard of the concept, you’re curious about your traffic.
There are several ways traffic finds itself to your web site:
- Via your comments: You may have commented on someone else’s blog and included your blog’s URL in your signature to that comment. Someone may click on that link and find your blog.
- Search engine referrals: Search engines like Yahoo!, Google, MSN, etc., may have crawled your blog and included it in their index. Visitors may land on your blog through searches they make on the search engine of their choice.
- Via direct links: Your blog may figure in someone’s blogroll or a direct link in a post.
- Via directories of blogs: yes, just as there are directories, categorized by topic, for web sites, commercial and non-commercial, so there are directories for blogs. Also categorized by topic. Some of the better known directories are Technorati, Blogwise, and Blogflux. There are others that do more than just list blogs, they track your page impressions through a script or an invisible 1×1 pixel image that is pulled from their server. They then use this to give you a blogrank. Many bloggers wear this button or chiclet with pride. The referrals I have seen from these directories have been far and few, though. I think most of these come from those who are adding their own blogs to the directory and decide to do a search to check out their competition! But it’s a great way to get the search engines to find your blog as these directories are crawled bythe search engine spiders. Once you’re in and you have other bloggers linking to you, I’d recommend getting rid of these little chiclets. These chiclets add clutter to your blog. And quite frankly, if you write well and your posts are relevant, smart and witty, who cares whether you are ranked #1 or #241. Some people do and they need to get over it. Your blogrank is worth nothing if you can’t convert it to something worthwhile. But, I digress from the topic of this post, which if you haven’t figured out yet, is: Where my traffic comes from.
- Via Bookmarks: Someone visits your site and then saves your URL to a Bookmark or as a Favorite in their browser. Then there are social bookmarks, a fancy term for shared bookmarks, like del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, pageflakes; or someone may have even dugg your post!
- Via links in emails: Someone may have found your post so worthy that they sent your blog’s URL in an email to their friends.
- Yourself: A lot of your traffic comes from you. Yes, you! When you check your posts as soon as publishing them; when you view your comments; when you show off your blog to your friends and neighbors; when you surf your blog for that mutter paneer recipe you posted a year ago; and sometimes because you surf your own blog because you are your favorite writer.
- Search engine spiders or bots: In order to make your blog ‘findable’, it must be crawled. Search engine spiders are automated programs that grab the content of your blog and then save it in their database. It is categorized, indexed and ranked according to their special algorithms. For a long time, the only visitors you may have besides yourself, are search engine spiders.
Well, that about covers where your traffic may come from. Let’s hope that by my next post, I will have more human visitors than search engine spiders and that you will have figured out why you blog.