406 Not Acceptable

Geez, now that was some challenge. I even managed to write up 36 articles in a 31 day month, that’s more than I originally planned. This was a difficult task, but it has helped the site grow. If I had just kept to a ‘one or twice every week’ strategy the site would have just over 10 articles by now, but instead it has around 40. Okay, so some are little snippets about being tired, but a post is a post!

SEO wise, this has given the site a lot of links in the ‘blog archives’ and has given it a number of content rich articles; although, it hasn’t really done anything for the sites hit counter. Hits have stayed at a steady low number for the entire month; although if the site was more established (if I did this on my other site: Tech Rant) then the results may have been much more posative.

Anyway, over the current month I won’t be attempting to post every day. Instead I’ll just try and keep it down to longer, more worthwhile posts. I’ll attempt to make sure the site gets at least 2 new articles each week. In addition, I’ll be putting more focus in the articles this month; I’ve already got two saved articles about the Eee Pc, as I am trying to do an ‘Eee Pc Week.’

Don’t worry, the random picture of the week will remain! I’ve still got to upgrade to Wordpress 2.5, so I might mess around with the theme of the site.

Since I finally started getting traffic yesterday, and the head story was on Search Engine Optimization (SEO,) I might as well talk about it again. If you come here for more than that don’t worry, as SEO will just be one of many topics that this blog will cover. So if you want to read about my return to AMC Cinema and attempt to get free drinks, then yes, I will get round to that — probably on Wednesday.

Anyway shall we get back on topic? If you’ve tried link exchanges and posted a decent amount of good content and still struggle to get many hits, then this post is for you. Driving unique hits can be difficult, especially when autosurfs violate the Terms of Service you agreed to when you joined Google Adsense. This is where StumbleUpon comes in, it can bring you some free traffic; however, you will find it only gives you a small amount of targeted traffic. You may be content with this, but don’t be! There is a way to get more targeted traffic from StumbleUpon — through StumbleUdon, emphasis on the d! If you’re interested there is an invitation link at the bottom of this post, the only way in to StumbleUdon is via invitation!

StumbleUdon helps drive more targeted traffic to your site through SumbleUpon, thus the traffic is legitimate traffic. You don’t have to rely on StumbleUdon as the users it brings to your site may vote ‘I like it!’ on StumbleUpon, thus bringing more traffic to your site. Don’t worry if Stumblers spend little time on your site, as that is just their nature. We would all be swimming in cash if every Stumbler read the entirity of our blogs and even clicked and advertisement, things just aren’t that easy.

If just ten users come back, that is ten more returning visitors to your site. If you were to get ten returning visitors every day from this, then in one year you will be getting 3,560 (or 3570 if it’s a leap year,) extra unique hits to your site. Once your at those levels, or even at half those levels, you can rest easy as content alone should keep your site alive.

 Invitation to StumbleUdon

As this site is new ‘Search Engine Optimization’ (SEO) is needed, and I thought it might be best to post something about SEO, since many blogs and websites have trouble with it.

If you’re reading this I presume you have a relatively new blog (I’d say less than 4 months old,) and it has little traffic. At this point you are at the bottom of the site ladder and it is a hard ladder to climb. You see you have a problem hits, links, and content are all related in success. Take it that you have a successful site, if you keep produce good content you will always get hits and links; if you keep getting links from past visitors you will still get links; if you keep getting hits (from past SEO) you will keep on getting links. From this breakdown you might be thinking that content is king, well to some degree it is. Content does drive links and hits, but this is not the full story.

For a new site content is not king, it does not matter if you are producing the best content in the world if you have no regular visitors or aren’t picked up by the search engines because you have no links. You see beginning a new site is the hardest part of being a webmaster, especially when you have no successful sites to leach links, visitors, and page rank from.

Consider you have a new site (less than a month old,) and the following three scenarios:

1. You focus on getting links

I’d presume you would go round commenting on’ do follow’ blogs, adding the site to directories, and making forum posts with your link in the signature.You will get a few visitors and will probably get decent indexing, but you have no content. So visitors will not stay and the traffic will die. Effectively leaving the site back at square one.

2. You focus on getting hits

So an alternative would be to spam some social networking sites. Perhaps getting your site on StumbleUpon, MySpace friend spamming, even use some autosurf programs. Yes these methods will get you hits, but again with no content the hits won’t stay. Secondly, you won’t get any links made for you from these visitors as there is little for them to link to.

3. You focus on content

After a few weeks of writing long, quality posts you may have a nice site; however, with no promotion the site is not going to grow. Perhaps the search engine bots will pick up your site, but all that content is going to waste. Secondly, as content makes its way to your archives it is effectively dead, as no-one saw it and no-one linked to hit.

I hope this has demonstrated that there is no golden solution, and that there is no easy path. To build your site successfully you need to focus on all tree of these factors in the early stages, effectively building a good foundation for your site. You will need to post good content at least 2 times a week and promote your site at the same time. You should be attempting to comment on other blogs that do not use the ‘no follow’ tag, this will build both good links and some small traffic. This is especially effective if the blogs are relevant to yours, or are personal blogs by people in the same field or with similar interests to you. Finally use the social networks, StumbleUpon can drive traffic that may never think about clicking a link to your site, the RSS feeds can bring good traffic that can become regular.

I hope this post has highlighted the difficult task a new site has. If it was easy everyone would have a successful site.