visnum

I see that Saddam’s Execution Video brought great traffic to many web sites that blogged or posted the video of execution from youtube and google video. Some of those blogs and web sites are about daily news, political stories, catch-all news stories etc. It is very natural for them to seek for the newest and brutal and most graphical video of Saddam’s Execution in Iraq.

However, there aren’t only such blogs and web sites that published this video. There have been many blogs and web sites where two videos of Saddam’s execution was published. Both the formal one and the one taken with a cell-phone’s camera.

Those posts and articles and the video brought a considerable amount of traffic to those blogs and web sites. Unfortunately, not all of this traffic is beneficial to web site owners.

Well, if you blog for the joy of blogging and you like to see the increase in traffic after you post something new, and if financial gain or public relations of yourself and/or your company isn’t your concern, then you are fine. Go for it. You have every right to publish anything that is not illegal.

But if you are a problogger or responsible from a web site that makes money from advertising, or an online shop, then you must be careful about how you provide your website with traffic, especially via content you publish.

Hundreds of thousands of web sites benefited from the huge traffic that Saddam’s execution video brought to their web sites. Most probably, the traffic wasn’t targeted. I have seen many blogs and web sites that published this video regardless of their blogs main topic. If you are after increasing your traffic because you earn money from targeted text links, then this has no benefit to you. Apart from not being beneficial, it would also harm your consistency on your content and thus may result in less targeted traffic than before.

Now, those blogs and web sites that experienced a huge traffic thanks to Saddam are going to experience a considerable amount of decrease in their traffic, if their topic isn’t executions of dictators.

Worse than publishing the video is publishing the video without any comments or your own thoughts or feelings on the subject because you have became the same with hundreds of thousands of other bloggers. No difference. The video can be found anywhere on the web.

By the way, the same holds valid for people that use common popular keywords for increasing their numbers of visitors. I have seen many blogs that put every post into categories or tags like Miss Nevada, Boise State, Google, Jobster, Zune, Edelman. Those are the most searched topics on Technorati. Or they put keywords like “Madonna, Christina Aguilera, Harry Potter, etc.” in their meta tags. I am sure they have gain tremendous amounts of traffic with those keywords. However it brings also a guarantee to failure when it comes to targeted traffic and efforts about earning money from targeted ads. Those blogs and web sites are eliminated by major search engines when somebody reports them or simply automatically as robots get more and more developed each year.

Targeted traffic is very important in terms of online businesses and Saddam’s execution is just an improvement to the world peace, not an improvement to your pocket.

WordPress is beautiful and functional content management system. However, due to its excessive popularity among bloggers, it is mostly seen as a blogging-only tool.

WordPress has native features for a static home page in it. For instance, a WordPress installation first looks for home.php which can be used as a front page. It only loads index.php if there is no home.php specified. Let me tell you what that means in plain english: You don’t have to be stuck with themes and templates that are prepared primarily blogging in mind. WordPress has a feature so called pages, that are apart from the blogging cycle. By using home.php, header.php, footer.php, sidebar.php (alongside with sidebar widgets or not) and several pages.php, you can easily use WordPress for your static web site content, for instance for your corporate web site or brochure-ware.

I won’t go into detail right now because there are tons of documentation on the web about how to prepare a home.php, how to prepare page templates for WordPress.

Why should I use WordPress if I am going to have just a static web site?

Because you will still benefit from hundreds of plugins developed for bloggers. Then you will also benefit from a great documentation. Furthermore, you will take the advantage of WordPress’ builtin editor, management panel, etc.

Why don’t you put together a tutorial for what you tell here?

It’s just a matter of time. I’ll try to provide one soon.

I like visiting Technorati and look for what is hot. However, especially in the last couple of weeks, some bloggers abuse Technorati search results by both tagging their every single post with the most searched 15 topics in Technorati and using these as keywords in their posts. That makes it really difficult if something you really need to search is on Technorati’s popular searches list.

I am sure that the Technorati team is working on that and I hope they come up with a solution soon. A feature such as being able to vote for search results would be interesting and help build a cleaner better Technorati search.