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I've recently seen a large increase in traffic to this blog from blogger.com, meaning more and more bloggers are following me. Great to have you! Just in case it's helpful, I thought I would share a few tips picked up from analyzing traffic over the last few months.

We all have different goals for blogging, and it's totally fine if you don't ever analyze your traffic or try to boost your readership. But I will say once you start looking into it, you will be surprised how many people are connecting to your insights. Here a few quick and simple ways to boost your traffic:

1) Use an analytics service. Wonder how I knew about the increase in traffic from blogger.com? My analytics service helped me track it. If you aren't using one, I would suggest you do. Most of these services are free - StatCounter and Google Analytics being two of my favorites - and will start giving you fascinating data immediately after you add a few lines of code to your template or add a widget. Imagine being able to see who sends the most traffic, which search words bring people to your site, and how folks navigate your blog. This week my top referral sites were run100s.com (Stan Jensen's encyclopedic site on ultrarunning), wikipedia (largely on Dean Karnazes inquiries), and forum.somethingawful.com (from a forum conversation that linked to toenail removal), and my top search terms were "caballo blanco", "coconut water", and "cross country championships". It's a fascinating time suck. ;-) Once you get some analytics, a few of these other suggestions will make sense.

2) Add the LinkWithin widget. If you look at the bottom of my blog entry, you'll see a thing that suggests other blog posts you might like. That's LinkWithin, and it's a very simple free widget to add. On average, it has increased my traffic 18% without having to do a thing. But more importantly, it helps convert a lot of first time visitors into reading 2-3 pages. Odds are a few of them will be more regular readers.

3) Bring on the pics! Behind Google, my #2 contributor of traffic is images.google.com. This is from people looking for pictures of trail running, parks, people, etc., and has continuously been one of the big attractors of new readers to my blog. You can help Google figure out what your pictures are about with some clever image naming, such as "2009_xterra_trail_running_world_championship_hawaii_max_king_winning.jpg". Think about how many image searches might hit that - xterra, max king, hawaii trail running, etc. - especially over time. I've found a direct correlation to the number of pictures in a blog entry, and the number of visitors over time. Basically you can't ever have too many and if you name the images correctly, they will pull readers in for years to come.

On the flip side, I recently tried out "Snapshots", a widget that popped up a pre-link window that did not do much for traffic so I turned it off. I've also added "recent comments" on the right, but haven't seen a noticeable change in traffic. But I find it useful, so I will leave it up a bit longer.

Got a great tip? Let me hear it! It's how we all get better.

Thx, SD