Life Online

On one of my websites, I have a listing that I update each year of Easter Egg Hunts in Indianapolis. The page is hand coded html and has been indexed by Google for three years. I even have a couple of good direct links to it from other sites. Yet when I do a search in Google for Indianapolis Easter Egg Hunts, I don’t show up in the first 100 results.

Tonight I tried something different. I blogged about Indianapolis Easter Egg Hunts–on the same site. I included the same new Easter Egg Hunts for 2008. Then I did two things–I submitted it at Digg and pinged Technorati. Within two hours, when I did a search for Indianapolis Easter Egg Hunts on Google, I ranked 8th.

I don’t know what helped–the fact that Technorati indexed the article quickly or that it appeared on Digg. But it is quite obvious–if you want to show up in the search engines for what you write about (and thereby increase the number of people who read your blog), you need to be out there doing a little bit of self promotion. I’m not talking about spamming the world–just use a couple of tools in a fair way.

Try an experiment for yourself. Write about something interesting that not everyone is writing about. Heck, you can even make up a word and include it in the post. Write about something worth digging and Digg yourself. Then go to technorati and ping yourself. Wait a couple of hours and search Google for that term. How were your results?

(I’m making up a little word here and NOT digging this article–we’ll see if its Technoratitastic) 

Edited to add: Technoratitastic is the speed in which you can get indexed by Google if you ping your blog in Technorati.

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