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Gilligan over at the always informative Retrospace wrote an interesting piece on how to try and get more traffic to your blog site. Its really something I am sure we all think of whether we talk about it or not. I for one have done some research into the matter and only scratched the surface before really just giving up and getting back to simply blogging. I am not saying that I leave things to chance and that I have not done some things to improve my “chances” of hits and longer visits, but lately I have decided the thing that comes first, for me, is simply content and appearance, then tweaking my Search Engine Optimization settings and trying to figure how the hell to upload a sitemap to my server comes later, if ever.

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I felt it was a good topic and decided I could offer some advice, though I know so little on the topic both generally and specifically. I have learned some things along the way and yet I am not sure of what value they really are, and I wonder how much it really helps everyone to go to Google Analytics and see they only had 25 hits after busting their gonads for over a week on an in depth essay on the life and films of Hershell Gordon Lewis. Before I even give my dubious advice I would say that most of the blogs I visit are sites that are labors of love and I think most of the bloggers would continue to do posts even if they got 2 hits a day. I am certain most if not all of them (including myself) make no money at it and yet, understandably, they want recognition and community of some sort.

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My site here is totally new, less than one month. While the material was moved from an old URL that address is gone totally and does not redirect traffic. So after a month or so my highest traffic for a day has been 75 hits, and I am happy to see it going up and if I had a couple hundred a day a couple times a week (not counting myself when I click in) I would consider my work to be not in vain. But I even wonder of what value it is to really rely on things like Google Analytics to judge the “success’ of your site. I have a site at the now blocked in China Opera.com that was the original Uranium Café and a couple months ago it had a page rank of 3 on Google. Not real bad. It was getting a lot of traffic to get that rank. What is funny though is I had not even updated the site in over a year! It may have been getting hits from the Opera community, I do not know. I never added Analytics to the site to track the hits and now cannot since I can only access the site via proxys. Well, the point is that site ranks higher than my site now with a big fat zero, and I do not even work on it.

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On an up note I will assume my current site will generate traffic over time and get more and hits and maybe do better than that site did. I hope so. I will admit, I want traffic and comments and hugs from the net world. How to get the affirmation and submission I desire? Well, I will just give you my do and don’ts and see what happens. I think if anyone has any advice they can contribute from their own site, but I am not making a challenge or tagging anyone. Gilligan had a lot of good and practical advice and I will reinforce or perhaps slightly disagree with some of his points (such as long written posts), though I think I may go off in slightly different direction than he did, as he seems to have a little better idea of how some of the technical aspects work.

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1) Maintain a good and interesting site. Period. There will be good posts and there will be bad ones. You do not have to post everyday or ruin your marriage with your obsessions, but you must work and you must take what you are doing a little seriously, whether you ever make a single penny from it. I can usually tell a site right away that I want to save and visit a few times a week. The person writes with vigor and there are lots of well chosen images. The banner is self made and the sidebar is loaded with relevant topics and images. The site is balanced and shows concern for image as well as content. I do not care how well written the material is if the site lacks a vibrant appearance I just move on.

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If you want people to stay and come back you have to post regularly and maintain some reasonable standard of quality, and that can vary from person to person of course. What represents the standard for Bill at the Uranium Café is not the same standard for some one else, but a spotty half blank page that is updated once a month will go no where and stay there. Of course I have had some sites like that and it took a while before I got to the point where I could set something up like I have now in a month or so. We can also encourage people whom we think has some potential, and that is to be seen in their writing and basic layout ability rather than what they do with CSS or Adobe Photoshop. I am reading on CSS and HTML in my spare time, but some people are not yet there and we can help them out. I want more control over the page than I have now, but at one time I just worked with default settings. Takes time.

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2) Learn some things about how to optimize search engines to find content on your site. Look, you don’t have to try to outrank all the Viagra ads on Google, but you may want to learn how to track what you do and see what content people like and don’t like. That does not mean you have to change one damn thing that you are doing, but it can be fun to sit back and see what pages and posts draw traffic. On my site it is usually the pin up stuff, not surprisingly. My researched essays on Yes and Robert Fripp may as well be blank posts, but I will continue to do those posts, if only for myself because…er… I am a megalomaniac I guess.

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ANYONE CAN IMPROVE THEIR WEBSITE TRAFFIC, EVEN A HEAD IN A LABORATORY TRAY

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Some of the SEO stuff gets to technical and you can spend (e.g. waste) hours trying to figure how and where something is to be added in your header or footer, or what a sitemap is and how to make one and where it goes. Some platforms (like Wordpress) have plugins that help you set up some SEO options. It can take time to figure out how to use and then to see results. I think if your site is selling something you will want to drive traffic too you and away from others and all of this stuff is more vital. I knew a guy who could get high page ranks on Google using automating scripts or something. He would buy like 100 domain names and use the scripts to generate content on each one, with purpose of directing traffic back to his primary site and in crease his google page rank, just to try to sell people his Taoism program. Over my head and he definitely felt I was wasting my time. Maybe I was compared to what his goals were (to make big money off the net), but in the end you yourself have to decide whether you get 500 hits a day or just 5 is your site going to continue or not.

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Learn how to set permalinks. That is simply the way your post’s title is going to appear in the URL window. First select the setting that shows the name of your post and not the one where it is all letters and numbers. I don’t know what they are called but you have to figure some of this out for yourself the way I did okay.One type of permalink may look like this: http://mysite.com/6722=asd?hy5l/. How can any search engine figure that out. It is better if the permalink reads: http://mysite.com/bela-lugosi-as-dracula/, or the title you gave it. Usually you have to change this setting or you get stuck with the first one. It is hard to go back and change permalinks after they are set. I have read it is possible but I just change the setting before the first post now.

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You also will then need to learn to make what are called “long tail” titles. So if you write a Led Zeppelin post and the permalink is http://mysite.com/led-zeppelin then you have to compete with all the other Led Zeppelin permalinks on Google or Yahoo. Better to long tail it into something like http://mysite.com/led-zeppelin’s-1971-zoso-album. Now you have a better chance of getting a hit since you added a date and album title and band name.

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3) I tend to use lots of writing in my posts and that is a tricky issue. Lots of text can be intimidating. I do tend to not read over written posts or sites that only retell a movie scene by scene with little comment from the writer. If I am reading a site that relates to philosophy or history I expect lots of type but not sites about movies, music or comic books. However I cannot take a site to seriously that has no real body of writing. Some people post a picture then write two sentences about it. That can be okay as a break from hard work and way to keep posts regular and therefore your site alive in the blogosphere. A short post is better than a week with none.

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I think the blogger has to decide what they want. First of all, can they even write well enough to keep someone reading for a long post? If not they need to adjust their style and do shorter posts. I tend to rely on graphics and media a lot. I break up a long essay with pictures in between selected paragraphs. For a couple reasons. A movie blog needs pictures. People want pictures, to look at and use for themselves. And they want images they do not usually see on the regular sites. And second by breaking up the long post with images it gives the illusion that the post is not that long really (a trick I learned in Nam). Paragraphs broken by images can be digested more easily. You can of course add video and music media as well. I will not supply a tutorial on that since different blogging platforms (I use Wordpress) can use different plugins and widgets and methods of getting the media to work. No need to rely only on media however as some blogs do, since I can go to youtube.com directly if I only want to see videos. There are some site that are nothing but youtube videos lined up in a column with no comments really.

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Also, I am able to think about what I am writing quickly and I can type at a reasonable pace with a manageable amount of typos that I correct with spell check quickly. I can type up a long post rather quickly really. If you have that knack then by all means write your heart out. If people are gonna read it they will and if not they won’t. Spruce the post up with pics and promises of money. Do what you are driven to do while you are doing it.

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4) Comment on other people’s blogs. It is not possible to leave a comment at every blog we visit, but if you like someone’s site send a shout. A few words are fine, no need to debate with them or dominate their site with long comments. If they get back to your site once in awhile and say hi then keep it going. Leave your link at their site of course. See whose sites gets lots of comments then join in. Be supportive and polite. As they say in Chinese “pai ma pi” or roughly translated, kiss their ass. I jest, but really, if you want comments and visits you gotta give them too. Be reasonable of course with people and realize that they cannot always leave a comment no matter how thrilling your post is. I work hard on some of my music posts but none of them have a comment. I wonder if people like them at all, but I will continue to do them for a sort of therapeutic purpose I suppose.

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5) Join relevant forums and leave your link. Again, if you are abrasive and crude expect no visits from the forums you go to. I tend to just not deal with that stuff. I have gotten crude remarks to my site and they are spammed right off. You can disagree with my content and debate me even, but I do not have time for web psychos.

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Join blog communities like Technorati (I joined but still have no clue what the hell it is) and LAMB. I really like the LAMB and when I see a site I like I suggest to the person who runs it that if they ever want to see their children alive again they should join the damn LAMBs!!! I sent an invitation today to a guy whose site I like and I see he works hard on it. We all need to help each other really. Make links for the sites you like. You can use a free service at http://www.bannerfans.com/ that leaves a bearable watermark. Ask people to link to yours. I have found cool site from the links on people’s sidebars, like Becca’s at No Smoking in the Skullcave. If you can get a big site to link you then you will be doing much better, but that is almost a matter of chance and work both. You have to have the content and they have to find it.

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6) And lastly to get traffic always be sure to have pics of sexy girls in abundance. Not too sexy so that you do not become a pornographer, but I am telling you cleavage gets traffic. And just to be safe after this windy, pompous post I am going to put some strategically placed hooters right here. Better safe than sorry you know. I mean, if some one opens this site and sees all my witless scribbling they will pass this post right by, but if they scroll down and see gratuitous jugs then they will exclaim “bingo, just what I was looking for!!!”

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SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

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INCREASING GOOGLE PAGE RANK

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Well, those are my bits of wisdom. I think if you are making a site you like and love then do what you want to do the best you can. Do it in the hopes someone will stumble across it, like it, bookmark you and come back once in awhile. I think steady posting with good content and layout will get you reasonable traffic, unless you’re going for the gold medal in blogging or something. There are A LOT of movie and cult culture blogs on the net… A LOT! So go with the flow and find a little hole and burrow in and be content to some degree. And be patient. It takes time for your content to get crawled by search engine spiders. Not all of you content will be found and sent out to search engines, but relax and just keep posting. Strange things can happen.

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I recently was looking up information on Jimmy Page (whether he is part Asian, and it does seem his mother was part Chinese, I never knew this!) on the net and as I was scrolling down the 1st page of Google at position six was my site’s post about Jimmy Page’s Death Wish II soundtrack. I think I got a mere 46 hits for the whole day, but still it was exciting to see that my site somehow got to the 1st page for the search I was making. No prize but my wife gave me a kiss on the cheek and told me good job. That meant something at that moment and lets hope we can all have some little times like that in front of this grisly monitor.

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Today, July 26th, is my one year year anniversary of being married to Ivy. I have known her for a lot longer than that and we have been all over China really but right now we find ourselves ourselves in Kunming while she finishes up her master’s degree. We were married in Shanghai last summer and I just want to make sure evreyone knows how important she is to my life.

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Above are a few photos from her Picassa Photo Album and I recommend you visit there for some great pictures of us all over China and the southeast of Asia. You can also visit her blog site by clicking on her banner in the sidebar, the one with the guinea pig and rabbit. The top picture is of her in Vientenne Laos. Under that is me with some sun guard on my face in Burma (I never call it Mynanmar since the locals call it Burma and the military junta there came up with the name Myanmar to distance Burma from its past ties with Britain and it’s own monarchy). The last picture is of us in Si Chuan at a relief camp for earthquake victims. These kids may look happy and care free but they have been through hell and back. They are troopers.

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HAPPY ANNIVERSARY BOO BOO.

Wow, I have finally made it to 51 posts including my few pages and galleries. I also figured out a lot of widget and sidebar issues. I have to admit that after moving the post from the last URL to this one I am sort of worn out really. There were more issue involved than I care to mention right now, but if you go through the process know what you doing or have a friend help you, or pay some one to do it for you. I am also suddenly having formatting issues with Wordpress 2.6 that are driving me nuts. I do not know if this is a bug in the new program or if I need to reset something, but making posts are really hard. Everything scrunches together really and I have to make these “lines” that blend in with the back ground in Adobe Image Ready to put space between paragraphs and pictures. And stuff gets pushed out into the sidebar sometimes. I solve the problems eventually but only after a lot of work that I did not have to do before. A post that should take 10 minutes to format and upload can take an hour sometimes because everything in my edit box is screwed up. Going to Wordpress forums is usually a waste of time because those guys are super code geeks who can’t explain how to bookmark a page with out using the most cryptic language his side of Mr Spock.

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Anyway, that nightmare aside, I am about to the point where I can start making some new posts and stop updating from old files. They are all here though and a couple extra as well that I sort of had to the side. I added some new music sites I had on the back burner and will put some MP3s with those later in some form or another.

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I may be taking a break from all this. The past two or three weeks have zapped me and I am really burned out with the techy part of things for now. I am planning a trip to Hainan Island then Guangzhou and will be gone for as much as three weeks, then my wife will depart for three or four months to Tibet alone for some work and study. I cannot travel freely there and decided not to go in a corny, expensive, state monitored tour group. I could not even travel with my Chinese wife in the same group as they want to keep nationals and “lao wai” (foreigners) separate. We could pay for a private guide but it was really all disgusting to me so we blew it off. I am just happy the site is back up and I have a new hosting service. I may take a break and work with some music software I have had for a while and get away from this stuff. It has dominated my time and energy. But I will be back. Fear not.

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Thanks, Bill

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My first post here at the Café finds me, your humble administrator and purveyor of cult culture, in the midst of downloading and viewing a batch of films by Mario Bava and Ishiro Honda. You can expect some comments and images from those films shortly. The pictures posted here are from Bava films. The one at the top is from Danger Diabolik for sure, while the second one is from one of his later films I believe. I always welcome corrections and information I do not have concerning the topics I explore here.

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I am also in the process of collecting and editing tons of comic book pages and covers from comic’s silver and golden ages and will be posting those as well soon. I am going to try and stay a little focused here with my new version of the Café (this is the fourth incarnation actually) but I will no doubt be throwing in images and comments of and about classic men’s action and girlie mags, pulp paperback covers, surf and hotrod guitar music and God knows what else when the mood strikes me. There will be plenty of posts and pages on a myriad of pop/cult topics as the site develops. I simply do not want to be limited to commenting on cult and horror films only. While the site’s thrust will be film, film will not be the only matter for investigation and discussion. There is so much totally fascinating stuff to explore and talk about. I hope the site gives a little something to everyone who likes all this sort of stuff. And who the hell wouldn’t! So, welcome to the Uranium Café.

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