Online Media Cultist

I just realized that Blogger allows you to add tags to blog posts.

Actually, I must give credit where it’s due and that belongs to my online pal and fellow member of Blogcritics Magazine and The Mondo Project, Mat Brewster. I’ve seen tags appear on blogspot blogs countless times, I’m sure, but absolutely assumed that they were part of some fancy plug-in that was not for the likes of me.

Part of my reintroduction to blogging from my own site on Blogger (as opposed to writing exclusively for BC, which I did for about a year) is that I’ve been able to better tune in to how bloggers are organizing themselves and their information, promoting themselves, and building audience.

This post is a bit of an experiment. Since I started posting here regularly since the first of the year, I’ve noticed that the majority of my traffic comes from the following sources:

* MyBlogLog: A great networking site for bloggers, it also helps to bring in some traffic.

* Techmeme: Great great source for following current tech and online media stories and the conversations springing up around them. I’ve been able to hit this page a nice number of times, and have brought back some visitors because of it.

* Blogcritics Magazine: Cross-publishing at the old battleship BC absolutely has a positive effect on one’s “home site” bottom line.

* Search traffic: mostly Google.com, but drips and drabs from Yahoo!, Ice Rocket (I think mentioning Mark Cuban’s name helps, which is indeed worthy of another experiment!), and Google Blog Search.

Search traffic is that great randomizer. If you can pull lots of it, you can sail off to Tahiti for six months and still have rip roaring traffic stats when you get back. If you don’t, it’s a grind-it-out battle to itch and scratch each reader home for supper.

This is somewhat the topic of a raging debate of the online moment, with entrepreneur and provocateur Jason Calacanis setting off fireworks with talk of SEO (search engine optimization, or rigging one’s code to harness more search engine traffic) being “bullshit” and a swift and immediate blowback from the likes of Neil Patel following, who challenges Jason to allow him to increase his own traffic “by a minimum of 10 to 20% after 30 days of putting my changes into effect” with promises of no shady dealings on route. And it seems Jason has accepted – the great SEO throwdown is on!

In any event, without being shady (I know so little about code that this would be very difficult anyway!) and as openly as I can, I’ve placed a nice number of wide ranging links and references here that hopefully add up to nearly a coherent whole.

I’ve listed the following blog tags as part of this post: blogger, blog, blogs, google, search, SEO, ice rocket, mark cuban, google blog search, techmeme, mybloglog, blogcritics, jason calacanis, neil patel, page rank

So the questions are: did I “optimize” this post by writing a decent piece and linking out to fellow bloggers and engagers in the online conversation? Or will dropping a deluge of tags at the bottom help auto-magically bring home some visitors? Or, perhaps, did none of this pile up to a hill of e-beans in the vast vacuum of the blogospheric realm?

I’ll report back the results, and look forward to your thoughts.

We all know that the power of Google is omnipresent, right? That’s a given. Zillions of people search Google.com googillions of times a day, creating search engine-driven traffic to sites and blogs the world over. That many millions of dollars exchange hands due to these actions, via Google Adwords and Adsense and advertising on referral websites, is a mysterious thing and a fountain of wealth for those who get it right.

People find websites in many other ways, of course. The best ways for publishers include being popular and well thought of enough that large numbers of regular visitors know a URL by heart, have a site bookmarked and visit it often, or are subscribed to one or more site RSS feeds.

TechCrunch, through its CrunchNotes site, has provided an unusual level of detail as to how people wound up at the popular site during December, 20006.

Traffic from the Google universe dominates, which is normally something of a given but striking in that we see that even for a well known site with thousands of devoted regular readers looking for news, reviews, and analysis of the tech and Internet industries, Google search and related products still sit in the number one and four positions. (There is an interesting discussion in the comments area about what the difference is between “Google – Organic” and “Google.com – Referral,” with ideas floated about Google.com search traffic, Google Reader, and paid AdWords placement.)

In a way it’s a little disheartening to know that even a broadly popular site like TechCrunch receives a significant percentage of its traffic through search engine referrals. It’s enough to make you think that it’s possible to hang up your blogging hat to craft perfect search engine friendly titles (Google’s Sex Scandal Causes Paris Hilton to Leave Iraq), write some gobblygook, and reap the search engine-derived rewards. In fact, this is pretty much what sploggers attempt to do, causing Google and other search engines to crush the page rank (or relative position within its search rankings, some call this Google Juice) of any site that smells of non-legitimacy.

For real websites trying to get real traffic – and not tempted to join the dark forces of cyber crime as I am – getting hammered by Google is a very real and frightening concern. In essence it’s like being a supplier of goods that is wholly dependent on Wal Mart for business survival. No matter how good or bad the quality of goods being produced, Wal Mart can always move onto another supplier, and then you’re shut out of the largest marketplace with no recourse.

Of course, many will argue that if you create great and consistent content, if you network and market your site effectively, then readers will come and stay. And this may be true to a certain extent. But the truth is that the true and truly consistent traffic numbers flow from Google (and other search engines but a far lesser extent). High quality links and regular readers can help to increase your visibility and page rank within Google’s search algorithm, but in the end the equation is the same.

So what are ambitious bloggers to do, those who want to write about things they’re passionate about and attract lots of repeat visitors at the same time? The simple answer is stick to the basics: find an area of expertise, write about it consistently, market and network the best you can, and then hope that the Google Love in the end outweighs the Google Evil.

One growing area for consistent traffic may come in the form of social news referrals. Digg and Reddit sit at number three and number nine on TechCrunch’s list, respectively. Social news referrals are essentially a result of an algorithm driven – in theory – by site visitors themselves. Get enough votes or diggs and you hit the jackpot of getting your story placed on the front page, where a story will reap the benefits of potential thousands of site visits.

Social news sites have their own issues, but it will be interesting to see if, as they continue to grow, they may begin to rival search engines in driving traffic to particular kinds of sites.