visnum

I have been thinking on a project that involves some minor information design. I suddenly caught up by the idea of what is a post and what is an article. This reminded me of a blog post of Dave Shea.

I think a blog is news source regardless of what is it about. It may inform you about that the blogger saw this movie and has slept with that person, etc. It’s a news source that can tell you that the blogger person has written a new article, but its not the article itself.

Therefore, Wordpress has the static pages feature. So that the user will be able to both blogs about this and that and then also writes articles, or essays in whatever kind of nature.

Just a couple of cents in a break.

I recently added something to my home page. The addition is a little information on what this web site is about.

I have done that because I noticed the fact that even blogs have to identify their home pages. When users land on to any post or page from search engines like Google, there is a purpose there. The visitor reads the page, gets the information she needs and that’s it. However, if she clicks for the home page, than there must be some additional information where she is and what this place is all about. Briefly, of course.

Do this for your own good. The less confused visitors you have, the more user-friendly you will become (Master Yoda, 2007). Becoming more user-friendly is beneficial for your sites search engine optimization, results in more people bookmarking your site and increase overall quality of experience of your website or blog.

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.