Your Blog
Blogging is something that most web surfers do. They either have their own blogs or they comment on others'. Having a blog page where you can post your thoughts and have others respond is therefore a good idea. A blog is not a comments page for your article. A blog is where people can share their thoughts on the articles posted.
You can therefore have a website where you give reviews and sell software, and have a blog where you can discuss everything from how a certain IT company is following trade practices to the state of the economy. These comments may not find suitable space anywhere other than your blog and having a separate page for it is a good idea.
Have your blog in your website
This is something that a number of people fail to do. They will have a website and have a blog, but they will both be in different domains. Some people actually go to the time and the effort of creating their own website but host their blogs using free software like WordPress
Leaving aside the impracticality of this, you will also be losing out on driving traffic to your site from your blog. Web traffic is not all generated through just one source and it is only by combining a number of sources that you get where you want to be. Blogs are one of these options. If you have started blogging about an interesting topic there is every reason for people to follow through to your website if it were in the same domain. By splitting them up in different locations you are losing on a certain amount of the traffic.
The best way is to host your blog as a sub-domain of your primary domain which is your website, and the worst is to use other hosting sites like BlogSpot or WordPress. By hosting your WordPress blog on your own webspace, you increase your website size and content range, by discussing and talking about your website content via your own blog. This way the search engines not only see your website blog, but they also see your website which is linking in. Creating back links to your website from blogs is an amazing way to get extra traffic.
Hold off on Comments
Most people who create their websites make sure that they incorporate a comments section. This is done so that people who visit can start to leave comments. This is very useful because many times people who comment on your section will also link back to their articles on similar topics. Of course, people do this to increase their own ranking, but it is also helpful to you if you have more unique people linking to your site. It improves your standing with the search engines tremendously.
There is one problem with this though and that this section is like a two edged sword. If you are a regular web surfer you would have come across umpteen sites where there is not one single comment written. Of course you can employ others to write in a few, but it is very easy to make out the real ones from the fake. Rather than do this it is better to leave the comments section blank.
Yet, leaving it blank seems to imply that your site really does not have many
followers. It can give an empty feeling to the site and even if the content is quite good, just because there is not a single comment in it many people will not return to your site.
When do I start it?
The best way to tackle this is to start up this section after some time. During this time you will be trying various different methods to improve the rankings and improve traffic to your site. Once you find that you are getting around 500 to 700 hits who stay for some time every day would be the right time for you to start this section. If you are offering an RSS feed you can start as soon as you hit the one hundred subscribers mark.
What you are ensuring by doing this is that your site has a minimum quorum that will at least follow up on comments once someone starts off. Plus, you are also improving your chances of having at least one in this group who will in the least leave a “Good job” in the comments section. Of course, you may lose out on comments on previous articles, but it is a risk that you will have to take.
There is no rule governing how long it will take for this to happen. For all you know you may start seeing a lot of activity in your blog once you post your first article itself and if you find that there are a number of people leaving comments about what you have written, you can open the section on the second day itself. All we advise you to do is to open the comments section only when you feel that you will have a good number of followers who will use the section instead of leaving it empty.
Create a Sitemap
A sitemap is just one page where you have the whole layout of your website. Smaller simpler websites may not necessarily want one, but sites that have a number of pages definitely have to have one. This page is very important for two reasons.
First, if you have or are planning to have a large number of pages to your website, it is better to have one page from where people can navigate to different places on your site. It makes the whole browsing experience simpler making sure that you do not lose any visitors because they feel that navigating your site is too complicated.
Second, this page is important because you can submit this page to search engines to index. This has the double advantage of forcing the search engine crawlers to follow all the links in the page thus indexing all pages and also ensures that your site gets indexed quicker. Sometimes, especially if your site has a large number of pages crawlers do not probe more than two links into the site meaning that pages that lead deeper into your site are left un-indexed.
Many people who have such sitemaps find that this page gets ranked much higher in most search engines for most keywords than the actual page dealing with the keyword giving you the double benefit of a higher ranking as well as making sure that people visit other pages in your site.
How do you organize the sitemap?
This is basically up to you. Some people just have one page where they have links to all the pages in their website. This page will not be visible to the browsing public, but will be useful for the search engines to index all the pages in your website. This is the simplest form of having a sitemap Others use JavaScript drop down menus to help navigate their sites, but then the crawlers do not read this. This means that you will have to have a text version of the sitemap done just so that it gets indexed. You can always keep this portion invisible while keeping the scripted portion visible.
The formatting of the page is up to you. Depending on the number of main pages you can follow the traditional top across, or left vertical method. If you are good at designing you can even follow a completely new method. It is however safer to stick with the traditional if only because it gives some familiarity to your website from the point of view of first time visitors.
Big Traffic
Traffic to websites is a very fickle thing. There may be days when there is almost no activity, and there may be days when the amount of activity can almost bring your site down. Only with experience can you gauge if there is any pattern to this or not. Different sites dealing with different subjects have different patterns and there is no way to gauge what sort of traffic pattern you will have until you start yours and keep it running for some time.
It is however a given that there will be days when you see a bump up in traffic. There may be a very sound reason for this, for example, if you are releasing new software on your site. Other times, your site may be pulled out of near obscurity simply because some factor outside your influence has turned the public eye your way.
For example, if you have a site that deals with global warming, you will see a certain amount of activity on a daily basis, and then one fine day there may be a storm somewhere that put a whole township under water, or a huge chunk of an iceberg may break off the Antarctic. The next day you may see a tremendous jump up in traffic.
As soon as you see that there is a jump in the traffic, even if only slight, make sure that you take advantage of it. Start increasing the number of posts, and make sure that there is some activity in your site within the next 24 hrs. Some web surfers are not known the most loyal and will immediately forget about your site if there is nothing happening for more than a day.
In this day and age where things happen really fast, it is the people who keep track and take advantage of small shifts in traffic patterns who do well. The web is a media outlet much like your television, and if there is something happening and a particular channel is not covering it, how long would you stay with that channel. Exactly how long others will stay with you if you do not take advantage of something happening in your field.
You may only have a site that has software for sale, but if Apple is releasing a new version of their iPod it is best to take it up. If you feel that the topic is outside the scope of your site, start a topic on your blog, that's what blogs are for. This is also a good way of driving traffic to your site, especially if you have your blog as a sub-domain.
