In the quest for getting more readership for my blogs as well as for the ones I'll be hosting for charitable organizations, I've been doing a lot of research into search engines and related topics, including SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Now, let me just mention that I was once a search engine website webmaster. About a decade ago, I was the first official webmaster of a (now-defunct) engine that used to be the fastest in the world. I never wrote any computer code for the actual engine, but I do have some insight into how engines crawl the Internet, etc. I've also written my own "web crawlers". Withouth getting into a lengthy technical discussion, what I want to say is that if you want to get high readership for your blogsite(s), you need to get high placement in as many search engines and directories as possible.

Conceptually speaking, this is not impossible. In fact, a blogsite has an advantage over a website page because the former usually has constantly updated information. If the blogsite is on an engine's "to crawl" list, it is probably getting indexed more often than a website with similar but static content. And all that delicious new information is getting hungrily indexed by regular and blog-specific engines (ie., blogsearch.google.com), and can thus be searched for more easily. Since a blog usually has several postings on the main page, provided you are blogging about the same topics in a single blog, you are building up "weight" for your regular keywords every time you post a relevant new entry. On the other hand, a website's main page is typically static. So even if it started life high on the search engines, it may eventually disappear from sight.

The good news, for me anyways, is that I'm starting to get more referrals from search engines rather than accidental travelers. Before, while I got an almost immediate response after I pinged (I use the ultrafast Pingoat, as well as Blog Writer's built-in pinging), many of the visitors are fairly casual and end up on my blogs due to "just pinged" lists. You want to get more engine referrals, because then, it's more likely that the reader wants the information you have to offer.

It takes time and good, fresh, regular content to attract regular readers as well as build up search engine presence. But without establishing yourself in engines and directories, you are competing against millions of blogs. No one is going to find you (on a more permanent basis) without some effort on your part.

(c) Copyright 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.blogspot.com

Technorati : blogging, blogosphere, increasing blog readership, ping, search engine. index, seo