Well, today I will explain to you a little details on how search engines work and how knowing about this “secret” can help your blog grow 2-3 times.
When I first started blogging, my blog was on a shared server with about 10 other sites. After my blog got “digged” several times, I had more visitors than my server could handle. So I did upgrade it to a dedicated server.
Now, what’s so special about upgrading to a dedicated server?
Well, let me first tell you the “secret” behind search engines.
You see, search engines “crawl” your site and index your pages based on the different words, keywords, etc…etc…
Now if the search engine can “crawl” your site within 1-3 seconds, you are probably okay. But if you are on a shared server and it takes more than 3 seconds to “crawl” your site, the search engine will not come back to your site as often and your pages won’t get indexed as fast and some pages will come up missing.
What you need to do is make sure your site is always at 25% of full capacity on the server.
So if your daily traffic is like 500 uniques, it should be able to handle at least 2,000 uniques.
Search engines WILL crawl your site much more efficiently and send you more traffic only if your server can handle it.
If you are on a shared server and it take the search engines 10 seconds to “crawl” your site, they are not going to want to send you traffic because your site will be very very slow and cannot handle more traffic.
You see, Google’s branding is about bringing the “fastest” information to you. Now if someone searched for something and the site loads very very slow, that’s going to look bad on Google.
Of course, you need the content first and foremost, but after that, it’s all about SPEED.
That’s the worst kept secret that no book will teach you and you won’t understand unless you’ve experienced it.
It’s logical and common sense. Now, go apply it on your blog and start receiving 2-3 times more traffic simply because your server can handle more traffic.
What do you need to do?
You need to forsee how much traffic you will be getting over the next 1-3 months. If your server slows down a lot, it’s time for hardware upgrade. If you don’t upgrade, you will lose valuable visitors.
Although the original story has been updated as, “This story is a parody and is not intended to be taken seriously,” we can take a lesson on how to drive traffic to your website through an innovative marketing. (or is it scam?)
Regardless whether the story is true of not, this concept has proven to bring about 6,000 backlinks and made front page of digg.
Interesting fact is that the story was intended to target the keyword, “credit card” on search engines and I bet whoever is behind this did profit a little just couples days of this stint.
What can you learn from this?
Well, do not go out there and write a fake story but use something “viral” that everyone will find “unbelievable” or “looks too fake”.
When money.co.uk posted a story titled 13 Year Old Steals Dad’s Credit Card to Buy Hookers, the idea was that it could be read as a humorous parody piece that could get attention from social media sites, yield quality backlinks, and draw in hundreds of thousands of visitors. The backlinks would help the site achieve higher rankings on search engines, especially for the target keyword phrases that would include the words “Credit Card”.
To prove that quantity rules in the blogging world, I averaged about 5-10 blog posts per day on this site, Zedomax.net over the last week or so.
Before that, I rarely updated the site and wasn’t trying to bring any traffic.
As you can see, with lots of hard work blogging, you can easily go from 20-30 visitors to 200-300 visitors within a week or two as seen in the above statcounter graph.
Now, my next goal is to hit around 500-1000 visitors within the next 2 weeks. I probably won’t achieve it but it’s a good goal. On the other hand, there is also good chance I just might get there if I push to 24 blog posts per day.
Another secret I can tell you about why “quantity” works is that Google search engine is “all” about finding new information fast and giving that to the consumers.
The reason why the top 100 bloggers have minimum of 24 posts per day is because our world is full of information. Think of how many new things that happen daily. Do you think you can cover all the new information in just 24 blog posts? No, the answer is that who ever is providing new information quicker to the search engines will get a boost in traffic from the people who search for that information.
Now, the secret is, “you gotta blog about something new”.
If you look carefully, almost every blog post on this blog was about some new company that launched something. Next time someone wants to find out about that new company, guess who’s getting that traffic?
Well, enough about blogging secrets, you will have to wait till next time for more. Make sure to subscribe to the blog!
Basically, Google algorithm has been built to award sites with lots of links coming in and less going out.
You need to be very careful about giving out links on your blogroll especially if your blog is established.
Why?
Well let’s say you trade 10 blog links to 10 blogs with PR3 and your blog has PR4. That’s not going to help you get a higher PR.
FYI, you need to trade blog links with other blogs that have at least the same Pagerank as you do. Otherwise, you are really shooting yourself in the foot and your Pagerank will decrease over time.
Sounds simple but do you actually do it?
Well, I have to admit that I did trade blogrolls in the past very freely. This is actually good if your blog is new. But once you get to a certain point, you need to re-organize your blogrolls and make sure everyone in your blogroll is linking back to you. Don’t link to someone just because they are famous, you are not helping yourself.
Another Tip
Try to trade blogrolls with other blogs with the same ‘niche’ topic as you are in. The more related, the merrier.
Now, if you follow the above tips, you should start rising slowly with your Pagerank and don’t forget to subscribe to this blog!
Alexa will never be as accurate as “real” stats but at the same time, I believe they should provide the most accurate statistics as possible.
Let’s see what happens over the next couple days.
If your Alexa ranking has “shot up” or “tanked”, please feel free to leave a comment with you website and your inputs on the new system.
Check out the new features this new ranking system will bring:
In recent months we’ve heard from our Alexa users that understanding Internet usage beyond Alexa Toolbar users was increasingly of interest. Ask and you shall receive!
We listened to your suggestions, and we believe that our new rankings system is much closer to what you asked for. We now aggregate data from multiple sources to give you a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users.
You gave us many other suggestions as well, and we are working hard to implement them. We won’t tell any secrets just yet, but you can expect to see new features rolled out over the coming weeks and months.
Below are a few common questions we anticipate from the Alexa community, along with our answers.
My site’s ranking has changed. Was it wrong before?
Your ranking wasn’t wrong before, but it was different. Alexa toolbar users’ interests and surfing habits could differ from those of the general population in a number of ways, and we described some of those possible differences on our website. While the vast majority of sites’ rankings were unaffected by such differences, we’ve worked hard on our new ranking system to adjust for situations in which they could matter.
The new rankings should better reflect the interests and surfing habits of the broader population of Web users.
Why are the long range graphs gone? I can only get 9 months of historical data.
We are recalculating historic traffic data and will continue to add it over the coming weeks. We apologize for the inconvenience, but should have several years of data back on line shortly.
Will you change the rankings again?
We are constantly working to ensure that we provide the most useful data that we can. We will continue to fine tune our algorithms but don’t foresee any additional big changes. If you think something is amiss please let us know.
I liked the old rankings better. Are they still available somewhere?
We liked the old rankings as well. However, we developed the new system in response to the huge number of requests we got from users like you, and now that it’s done we like it even better. We hope you will too.
We think that having more than one ranking system at a time would be confusing, so we have removed the old rankings.
Do you want to know what I think about this?
Definitely. We’ve been collecting suggestions and ideas for months now, and would love to hear more. If you have thoughts on what we’ve done so far, or ideas on what we should do next, please share them with us.
Well, I was over at AdTech 2008 today, an exhibit which shows off America’s best advertising/publishing companies. Today, I found many new ways to monetize our blogs and social networks through various different affiliate and publishing programs.
I did get a chance to run into John Chow and also ask my own questions about how to make money online and the secrets behind his success.
I figured to take a video and share it with the world so maybe it will help you make more money too:
A lot of SEO companies, especially those that have been around for while, will sell you SEO services with promise to get you on the first page of Google.
What those SEO companies really do is buy links for you and re-sell them to you at higher price. Now, if those are lifetime links, it might be okay but if they are not, you are screwed.
Although I am not a total expert as I am not a solely SEO guy, I can tell you from my experiences blogging that PageRank is something you can’t buy.
Of course, you can go out there and buy some text links from such companies as TLA or other text link brokers, but this is like putting cocaine in your body.
Why?
Think of it this way. Everytime you snort those drugs, it will get you high for a short period of time, as soon as you your high is gone, you are worse off than you were before.
SEO is the same thing. Google doesn’t rank you because you have so many links coming in, their algorithm constantly changes to give users “the best content” when a user types in some keywords. You can buy links but how long is that going to last? Even if you did have millions of dollars, you are basically throwing all of that into the toilet the minute you start hyping up your blog or website with “text link” steroids.
So how do you go about it?
Here’s some guidelines that can help you get higher PageRank and also get #1 on Google for your target keywords:
1.Don’t buy text-links. Network with bloggers in the same topic as yours and “trade” blogrolls.
That’s right. Blogrolls are probably the most often overlooked free links you can get. Blogrolls are great because you are usually dealing with your blogger friends, who are trying to achieve the same goals as you are. And, they won’t spam their own site for those reasons.
Every time you communicate with another blogger, whether that IM, Entrecard, or whatever, see if you can get him to trade blogrolls with you.
This is probably the most important step for you to take right now, especially if your blog is brand new and your PageRank is zero.
Even if you trade blogrolls with PR0 blogs, you might find yourself lucky one day if your blogger friend gets PR6.
Everytime you write a post on your blog, you send out “pings” to Technorati and other blog ping services. (These are great for backlinks by the way.)
Now, if you had blogrolls made of 30 “blogroll trades”, everytime your blogger friend writes a post, you get “pinged”! (That’s 30 backlinks if every one of your blogger friends posted 1 article per day.)
2. Content is King. Write great articles that will interest people to read your blog or website.
From what I’ve seen, no matter how poor your PR is, if your content is good, people will read and your PageRank will go up. (because people will link to you)
Another thing, great articles are good but you need to post daily to get more PageRank.
Quality is probably more important than quantity if you want more readers.
Quantity, on the other hand, can get you more traffic faster.
Quality is great but if you only post 1 article per day, each with 10 tags, that’s the density of your keywords and tags read by Google and other search engines.
But let’s say you write 10 articles per day, each again with 10 tags. That’s about 10 times more tags. Tags are probably more important than anything else these days.
I find that Google indexes your content and later discards most of it when your post gets older and older but Google keeps the tags.
Anyways, the most important part is that you write great content, and the more posts, the merrier.
If you have a long article, try to break them down into 2-3 posts. That way, you will get more traffic in the long run AND your article is still quality first.
3. Link a lot to active bloggers who respond back to you
That right, you want to link to active bloggers who are likely link back to you.
For example, you find a blog post that you find interesting on the web, you link to it and write a blog post.
The blog you linked to blogs back in return.
Pretty simple but if you do this more and more daily, you will get lots of more links and more blogger friends who will help you in the long run.
Next time, we will go into more depth on how you can get your blog or website to be #1 on Google for your target keyword.
Hi everyone. We’d like to announce the fact that Zedomax Network has just broke through 1 million hits per month!
Compared to couple months ago when we were getting about 450K hits, we are now officially part of the Million Hits Network!
Number of unique visitors has also jumped to a whopping 445K visitors, up from 250K visitors in November.
Wow, things are looking up and most of this success has spawned due to the fact that all of blogs have great content and does not rely on any one social network to boost traffic.
With the recent addition of our latest Wiki project, SiteHoppin, we are able to bring more visitors to our sites and also bring up the overall stats.
We will be working hard around the clock to keep bringing you great content on the Zedomax Network.
Without our core bloggers, this would never happen. We’d like to thank also our readers for getting us to this point.
Although we are really not making any money at this point, we will be bringing you more great content and new Web 2.5 websites like SiteHoppin and more…
Wow, it’s been a fun ride with our new site, SiteHoppin.com. Although we haven’t really made that much money off traffic, the good news is that we’ve “doubled” our network traffic as whole in just 2 weeks since SiteHoppin’s public beta launch!
It’s great that our traffic is going up, but how can this help you? Go submit your blog posts at SiteHoppin‘. (The more you bookmark, the more it will get distributed to the SiteHoppers)
