Smart Aggregation, Not Search or RSS, Is Key In Getting Valuable Traffic
Fred Wilson has shared where the traffic to his blog, A VC, comes from. He made an important notion on how the majority of users have come to his site through search engines, but their dominance has declined in the past year. He notes that an almost good a source has been from sites he calls smart aggregators. By these he means sites that aggregate either algorithmically (Techmeme) or through user behavior (Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon) the most important new articles. The importance of these aggregators will surely continue to grow especially in topics like technology.
As Fred mentions himself, the traffic from RSS-readers has not increased for him, because they just are too hard for the average user to use. I have to admit that I personally fall into the same category. It’s not that I don’t see the value of RSS-readers, it’s just better (easier, faster) for me to get a pre-prioritized list of the most important news and post through Techmeme or even Friendfeed.
For most publishers and bloggers getting traffic from these smart aggregators is more valuable than getting traffic from search engines using some random keywords. Fred Wilson correctly divides search engine results between “search bookmarks”, which should be counted as direct traffic, and real search. The importance of Search Engine Optimization is not diminishing: see my earlier post about the declining importance of URL’s in navigation as opposed to search.
Starting a Blog: Tools
All startup companies need one and if you are thinking about setting up a blog or want to develop any site further, here are some of the tools I’ve been using while starting this blog and have found useful so far.
Blogging platform
I looked into a few blogging solutions and Wordpress seemed the best one for me. I wanted a simple install that can be hosted anywhere, but I also wanted flexibility and possibility to modify the look and features endlessly without superior technical knowledge. So far I’ve been happy with Wordpress and I’m going to post my thoughts on it in a longer post sortly.
What does Google see? Read more…
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