Hey all,
    I checked my mail today after a period of around 3 days. While sorting through the 116 various mails(yes, fortunately the mail torrents have been low for a while now), I came across one which said -

I was wondering if you could possibly explain how and what and how to
use: blogrolls, RSS feed, pagerank and dmoz to me. This is in reply to
your post about how to get more visitors to a weblog.

    Thus, I checked out my post at Blogging India, and saw that to a beginner, it would be absolutely useless. So I thought about explaining these terms to Eric, who sent me this mail…

BLOGROLLS
There are 4 basic points about a blogroll -

• You indicate what kind of blogs you like to read, and thus, people get to evaluate your interests with theirs
• You will get incoming readers from other blogs which have you in their blogroll
• Your Google Page Rank increases, thus giving you higher placing in Google Search and Google Blog Search
• Your Alexa ranking increases, which MIGHT bring you SOME traffic, but basically useless

    To maintain a blogroll is quite easy. There are many websites which offer you scripts to maintain a blogroll. For eg : Blog Rolling. In Blogger, you could add the links yourself, by editing the code. In Wordpress, theres the “Links” feature in built, just visit the Admin panel. In Typepad too, the Links feature is in built.

    So its quite easy to maintain a blogroll. Now how to get links, and how to link… Google for blogs with similar topics as your blog. Use Technorati, Wikipedia, Google Blog Search and other search services to find similar blogs. Send a mail to the author, or comment on the blog, get to know the author better, and then, ask him for a link exchange. Similarly, you can add links on YOUR website on sites which YOU read regularly.

    You could also review a good blog on your blog, and if the blogger you reviewed is somewhat sensible, he’ll see the back link, and link to your blog.

    Thats it about Blogrolls… In the coming days I’ll post more on RSS, PageRank and DMOZ.

    But in a nutshell, RSS is for people who like use software to check out updated content, or to read many articles using a single feed aggregator. Thus, RSS brings in more readers. So does blogrolls. PageRank is the Google technology for site priority during searches. The higher your PR, the better placed you are. Thus, Google PR gives you more traffic, as well as increase ratings for advertisers. DMOZ is a open directory project, which indexes all submitted sites. A listing in DMOZ will increase your overall site rankings, indirectly bringing in more traffic and money.

    More to come on these topics in the coming days… Until then, Aloha!

Technorati Tags: blogrolls, RSS, Pagerank, PR, DMOZ, significance, traffic, blogs