It’s been quite a month here at Digital Media Minute. I’ve doubled the traffic to this site and at the same time doubled the revenue from the advertisements you may see from time to time. I didn’t start the month with this goal in mind so I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the increased activity. I should also point out that my goal for maintaining this blog has nothing to do with visitors or revenue. I keep it going as I find it to be a nice way for me to keep up on the technologies that I use and research on a daily basis. The posts I create become somewhat of an archive of my research, and I find myself searching this blog, more than I do Google sometimes. And if other people like to read it and it generates a bit of revenue, then that’s just a nice bonus.

So I thought I would share with you a couple of the activities that I think have increased traffic to this site…

Content is King!

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been spending more time writing original content as opposed to just linking to other sites. My post on the Top 12 Rails Tutorials was the most popular item at del.icio.us and was on the Digg front page for a couple of days. This drew huge traffic (28,000+ uniques on Saturday and Sunday). My post on Microsoft - Three Big Announcements was picked up on Tech Memeorandum (if you haven’t tried Memeorandum, you should - NOW). And finally a post with an odd title - Changes to Firefox Tabs Coming - was Digg front page item for couple of days (I’m not too sure why - but it was). Finally my Character Entity Refernce continues to be a great draw recieving in bound links from the likes of Eric Meyer, Todd Dominey and Molly E. Holzschlag. So you want traffic? Create content!

Giving away free content

At work, I’m currently attempting to increase the search engine placement of some of our clients sites. I’m mostly looking at the basic stuff like semantic markup, creating crawler friendly urls, encouraging clients to increase backlinks into the site (legitamate ones of course). But I’ve also been looking at additional techniques, like placing content on Free Content sites. While I was testing this, I created a new domain and a small site to go with it (I can’t give you the URL as it may skew my research). One of the things I did to increase traffic into this ‘virgin’ domain, was to write a couple of articles and submitted them to Article City. Article City is a large collection of articles that are available for free to any publisher, as long as they keep the Author bio and links back to the author intact. Within a month of publishing the virgin domain and submitting the articles to Article City, the virgin domain was garnering just over 1,200 inbound visits from Google per day! Needless to say, I updated my bio to include a link back to this site, and I have seen a positive increase in search traffic.

A local web company that is supportive of our students has a nice Free SEO Tutorial to help you with your search engine placement.

If you have a site that sells a product, you might want to consider image search engine optimization. WebPro News shows you How To Optimize Your Images For Image Search.

Gina Trapani promises to Help the Googlebot understand your web site in this excellent article. Her tips are simple and reasonable and provide more proof that SEO doesn’t need to be performed by high-paid SEO experts. All of these tips are easily within the reach of any web developer.

The latest issue of Digital Web Magazine has a great article titled – SEO and Your Web Site. The author, Alan K’necht states that:

The basics of code optimization are just sound HTML coding practices; when followed, they go a long way toward SEO.

This article is very good as it focuses on web design best practices to help your search engine ranking and not on sneaky SEO tricks.

Anil Dash recently participated in a search optimization contest, based on a challenge to see who could be the first result for the gibberish phrase “Nigritude Ultramarine”. Being a novice in the SEO industry, and a little angry at SEO’s, he dedided to try very hard to win – and he did!

Optimizing Search Engine Optimization is the article where he discusses the why’s and how’s of his participation in the competition. It’s really a good and funny read!

[link via Digital Web Magazine]

Pagerank Status is an extension for Firefox that will display a Google Pagerank indicator in your status bar. This is the same type of display that is shown on the Googlebar in IE which is one of the only reasons I open IE nowdays. Looks like I’ll be using even less IE now!

SEOrank.com has a very good article that will help you Research techniques for keyword research, keyword analysis & keyword optimization. The article has lots of great tips and example techniques.

From their site, they state that :

“Identifying the right keywords for your website is crucial starting point in your SEO campaign. Select focused yet popular keywords which have ranking potential based on your PageRank.”

Sofware maker Axandra explains that a good search engine ranking can be prevented by these 19 mistakes. Their article has some great tips that show you the things not to do when trying to improve your search engine ranking.

Some wise words from Google on the effectiveness of Search Engine Optimizers (SEO’s). The infomation they provide offer a few tips that may help you distinguish between an SEO that will improve your site and one that will only improve your chances of being dropped from search engine results altogether.

Some of the simple tips include:

• You should never have to link to an SEO
• Be sure to understand where the money goes
• No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google
• Make sure you’re protected legally