RnR: Attracting Readers

. by Sean J. Vaughan

This article describes how readers can find and be guided to Reason and Rhyme articles. Our main traffic source is Google and so our first job is to ensure Google finds and ranks our articles as highly as possible.

Google PageRank

Google PageRank is how google assigns "importance" to web pages. Most of our web pages are either unranked or have a low PageRank. A very small percentage (<5%) of our pages have a medium PageRank. A page's PageRank increases by having other pages link to it and the increase is larger when the linking site has a larger PageRank.

Still, when you search for "Reason and Rhyme" you will should find our links on the first results page. Many of our articles will show up towards the beginning of the search results when you search for "epic poetry", "statistics of stereotyping", "the sonnet", or other queries related to our articles. Certainly most of our authors show up near the beginning of the search results when searched for.

For more information about google pagerank, read google's description. And, you can read a gajillion blog articles about it. Seriously, at least a gajillion.

Writing Articles for Traffic

Writing articles for traffic (aka Search Engine Optimized or SEO) isn't our primary motivition for writing. In fact, SEO approaches may hurt the quality of articles (e.g. poems). In general, though, the SEO approaches tend to make an article better; they are very similar to what I learned in journalism class.

Here are a few important things you can do to make your article Search Engine Optimized:

• Include keywords and key phrases in your article. A good strategy is to imagine what readers would search for if they wanted to find your article. If it's appropriate for the style of your article, make sure those keywords or key phrases are in your article. Maria's Epic Poetry article is very complete and so naturually contains many of the keywords and key phrases that are searched for including important epic poetry writer names, examples, themes and elements.
• Even better, include keywords and key phrases in your article title. This draws even more readers if they see what they were searching for in the title of the page returned.
• Make the title simple and catchy or provocative. This is where it's fun to pretend to be the classic newspaper editor. I imagine the excellently played newspaper editor in the spiderman movies. In any case, the title is what the search link will be in search results and is the first thing that can grab the reader's attention. Do your article justice with the best title. For example, I worked with my Dad on the title for his "Statistics of Stereotyping" article and it paid off in increased search results. We found something that was simple, had a bit of alliteration, fits the article well, and is thus searched for commonly and found.
• Put the meat of your article at the beginning. Most people browsing the Internet are not prepared to read a long article. If you put the main points of the article or what the article will be covering in the beginning then the reader knows what they are getting in to and may stay to read the rest, bookmark it for later, or buy a book.

For more SEO tips, check out my del.icio.us SEO bookmarks or check out all of the popular SEO bookmarks on del.icio.us.

Blog Carnivals

The single most important thing we've done to increase our google pagerank and traffic is to submit articles to related Blog Carnivals. From wikipedia:

A Blog Carnival is a type of blog event. It is similar to a magazine, in that it is dedicated to a particular topic, and is published on a regular schedule, often weekly or monthly. Each edition of a blog carnival is in the form of a blog article that contains permalinks links to other blog articles on the particular topic.

Having articles in blog carnivals provides 2 main benefits. First, blog carnival readers are directed to the articles and, second, the articles get linked to which increases the Pagerank for those articles.

Here is a list of blog carnivals we commonly submit articles to and the number of readers that tend to get referred to any single article:

• The Storyblogging carnival: ~15 readers
• Carnival of the Godless: ~100 readers
• Ringing of the Bards (poetry): ~10 readers

Note that these numbers vary to some extent based upon which blog hosts any particular carnival.

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RnR: Blog Traffic Data and Analysis

by Sean J. Vaughan

Here are some traffic statistics to give you an idea of how we're growing. We're using Google Analytics to collect and display this information.

Visitors per day

This graph shows the number of vistors per day we've gotten since the beginning of this year. We have had a small but steady growth curve to where we are now averaging about 50 visitors per day.

The spikes are largely caused by articles being popular in the social bookmarking sites or coincide with blog carnivals linking to our articles. The largest spike we've experienced was 140 visitors and occured in the Fall when Bob Seitz's Global Warming article was reviewed and linked to by (an evidently popular) stumbleupon.com user [this is not pictured in this graph].

Pageviews per visit

Our pageviews per visit are holding pretty steady at about 1.5. This means that, on average, one out of every 2 visitors checks out 2 articles before leaving the site.

Top Referrals

As you can see here, the vast majority of our visitors come from google searches. Next most are viewers coming directly. We've only shared the "ReasonAndRhyme.com" url to friends and acquaintences so those visitors basically count as "word-of-mouth". The "gabbly.com" referrer is the from the "Chat" feature which basically only I use (I think!) so that's probably only me. "Reddit.com", "stumbleupon.com", "del.icio.us", and "digg.com" are social news and social bookmarking sites (more about these in a later article). They refer many readers but only reddit shows up in our top 10 this year. "drsanity.blogspot.com" is a host of a very popular humor blog carnival where Richard May's "NASA Plans To Construct Earth Base" article was included. The rest of the top 10 referral sources are basically search related. I'll talk more about how we work to increase our position in search results in a later article.

Most Viewed Articles of 2007

Article	Unique Views	Pageviews	Avg Time	% Exit
The Sonnet	250	293	00:04:48	83.62%
Epic Poetry	128	158	00:03:52	77.85%
Valentine's Day Card	88	116	00:02:31	66.38%
NASA Plans to Construct Earth Base	96	104	00:01:00	89.42%
label: poetry	78	96	00:01:18	70.83%
The Statistics of Stereotyping	72	82	00:07:39	84.15%
label: Maria Claudia Faverio	64	82	00:01:45	50.00%
Must We Grow Old?	71	80	00:01:22	85.00%
label: Richard May	56	75	00:03:06	52.00%
Atheism Defined	61	73	00:04:06	69.86%
Mnemonics and Blindfold Chess	54	72	00:04:46	68.06%
Number Series Puzzle	42	66	00:02:30	51.52%
Winter Poem	54	60	00:01:10	85.00%
label: Brian Schwartz	39	54	00:01:57	51.85%
label: Dan Barker	35	51	00:02:41	45.10%

I've dropped the direct homepage hits from this list but there were 584 uniq views and 799 pageviews directly to the homepage. In a later article I'll describe what seem to be the primary causes for articles to get views. For now, I'll list briefly how I think the top 15 became the top 15:

1. The Sonnet
2. Epic Poetry: These are very complete and authoritative articles on the title subjects. People find it in google searches and read it once they click on the article. Epic Poetry was included in "Ringing of the Bards", a poetry blogging carnival.
3. Valentine's Day Card: The simple article title along with our blog title "Reason and Rhyme" caused google to put this article on the front page of searches for terms like "Valentine's Day rhyme".
4. NASA Plans to Construct Earth Base: This article was included in the very popular drsanity.blogspot.com humor blog carnival.
5. label: poetry: It seems that our blog title, "Reason and Rhyme", combined with the number of high quality poems and poetry related articles we post cause google to put us fairly high in poetry and rhyming related searches. Especially this label page which contains all of our poetry related articles.
6. The Statistics of Stereotyping: This article is a very simple and strong discussion of the topic which followed onto Albert Frank's article on the related statistics. It was submitted to digg and reddit. And, because of its simple and appropriate title, it shows up near the top of a search for "the statistics of stereotyping" which is a hot topic this decade.
7. label: Maria Claudia Faverio: Maria's articles on different forms of poetry are popular. This causes her label page which contains all of those articles and her poetry also to be popular.
8. Must We Grow Old?: This article has been included in several health related blog carnivals and has been submitted to digg and reddit.
9. label: Richard May: Richard has written a lot of articles and, again, his NASA humor piece was included in the humor blog carnival.
10. Atheism Defined: This piece shared by Dan Barker was included in the popular Carnival of The Godless and has been linked from several atheism related blogs.
11. Mnemonics and Blindfold Chess: This topic is commonly searched for and this is a very strong article about it.
12. Number Series Puzzle: Commonly searched for.
13. Winter Poem: This was included in the "Ringing of The Bards" poetry blogging carnival and is searched for regularly. Again, having "rhyme" in our blog title seems to help our poetry articles show up higher in search results.
14. label: Brian Schwartz: Brian has written many articles and they are searched for and found. His Winter Poem above, Club Kids, and Crawpappy's bar articles are commonly read. Also, recently, people have been google searching on a teenager named Brian Schwartz who was killed in an avalanche in Utah :( .
15. label: Dan Barker: Several of Dan's articles have been shared in The Carnival of The Godless and Dan has high visibility as co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

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RnR: New Site Layout, New Features

by Sean J. Vaughan

We've updated our look to be more unique and contemporary and in order to support new features. We've added "help" for providing information about certain sidebars. You can get "help" by hovering your mouse over a sidebar (or the "Share It" post section) for a second. We've also added two new sidebar modules: Shared Links and Freethought Radio.

The Shared Links sidebar displays the most recent del.icio.us bookmarks tagged with "RnRLink". If you come across something on the web you'd like to share on our blog, simply tag it in del.icio.us with the "RnRLink" tag and it will show up in the sidebar. (You will need to have or obtain a free del.icio.us account in order to submit Links).

The Freethought Radio sidebar displays the most recent podcasts of Freethought Radio which features Reason and Rhyme contributor Dan Barker.

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The Birth of an Intellectual Blog

by Sean J. Vaughan

Reason and Rhyme is in it's second quarter of life. We've posted over 100 articles, submitted about 50 times to 10-20 different blog carnivals, submitted articles to social bookmarking and article popularity sites and more. We have learned a lot about creating and managing a new blog and I'll try to share all of the major lessons with you, our authors and readers in this post and several future posts. There is a lot to cover! Therefore, I will cover various aspects including our traffic statistics and attributes, what articles get read the most, tips for finding readers, blog carnivals, our site features for connecting with readers, and more.

The Blog Ecosystem

The most popular and successful blogs are blogs about blogs. That seems both sad and understandable; with over 50 million blogs out there, somebody needs to tell us what blogging is, where to find them, and how to do it. More generally, the most successful blogs are about the Internet and technology. Anything about Google; Search Engine Optimization; web advertising; personal technology including cell phones, personal computers, digital cameras, etc.; Web 2.0; social bookmarking; all are blogged about ad infinitum it seems. And that's all well and good. But boring.

And, that's not us. I'm very pleased with where we live in the blog ecosystem. The uniqueness of our authors and their contributions gives Reason and Rhyme it's distinct identity which is as it should be. There are certainly still many other similar blogs but I'm proud of how Reason and Rhyme compares and our growth shows that there is a place for our creations in the blogosphere.

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