Blog Ranking (part 2)

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This is the second part of the series... and God only knows how many parts will there be. The first post (Google Blog Ranking... is it true?) was about Google and what people usually suggest in order to improve blog ranking. A month has passed and I think I can add some new thoughts on the matter.

I've actually started to think again about ranking after a question was posted on LinkedIn. That simple question restarted the fire! As usual I looked for answers and I visited some blogs around the net... and again I was disappointed. Anyway, let's start from the beginning.

Comments. What about them? A lot of bloggers give advices on how important comments are: everybody, after reading a post, should consider leaving a comment. That's right: it is quite a polite and clever thing to do. However, leaving comments is mainly done in order to draw traffic to YOUR blog. And it seems to work pretty well. Ok, but when you start a new blog it is suggested that you turn comments off because it is not really a good thing to see 0 comments on every post: nobody  will risk to be the first to leave a comment. So that ends up in a never ending circle: no comments feature, no one leaves a comment, no comments and so on.
Then again, as I mentioned before you should start commenting on other blogs to draw traffic to your blog. Honestly - and that's from deep in my heart - I do not like it. It seems to me like cheating. Whenever I will find something really meaningful to say I will comment on someone else's blog, otherwise I won't.

And that takes me to another issue: hidden visitors.
This is not about an alien invasion of some kind (even if it might clearly be a new series title). What I mean here is "how many visitors read my posts that I am not aware of?". Wow! That's a good question! Easily answered, in my opinion: look at your stats, my friend! Just to be clear, it is on my blog stat page that I see my recurring visitors. Actually they are hidden indeed: they are spiders! And when - very occasionally - they are not spiders, they are never recurring. They come and they go. Usually my stat pages report a sad "No stats yet, check again later" message. So... hidden visitors are not really hidden after all. They are not really there!

Despite the fact that most of the best advices you can find on the net regarding blogs are truly good, new blogs are really difficult to start. It is difficult to draw traffic to them, maybe because there are really too many blogs out there or maybe because everybody's talking about the same things.
However, let's look at the bright side of life. My first blog post is dated Friday, 9th of July 2010. As of now I had more than 100 visits (most of them it's me, but who cares!), I actually had some real hidden visitor lurking for a second (which makes me very - very! - happy) and so the blog is growing. I still like blogging and for the future we will see.
... to be continued ...