We’ve talked a lot about indie filmmakers using tools online, but we haven’t really addressed the intricacies of raising your blog profile. My approach has been to just write and see what happens, trying different tools and tactics along the way to see if any of it makes a difference.

One of the most effective ways of having your blog appear in a search engine is having unique content, words that are particular to the topics you address. Also, having others with content-rich sites linking back to you. You can assess some of this by doing a search and seeing how high (or not) your site appears. Using trackbacks helps keep other blogs apprised of when you link to them - Wordpress has a handy “Incoming Links” section in the admin section so I can see when others have posted about me or trackback to my posts. Commenting not only helps you to be included in the blog community, they are usually accompanied by a link back to your site, which pops up in the search engine crawlers.

I’ve also signed up for Technorati, which is a kind of ranking site. There are many others but I just wanted to see how it worked so I chose that one because of popularity. I went from something like 400,000nth to 200,000nth in the past few months, a dubious jump I know, but nice for me. I was reading a post by Eugene Hernandez who linked to a Washington Post article about Jesus Camp. I noticed on the Washington Post page, that it tracks who is blogging WP articles using Technorati tracking. Interesting - if you blog it, and it shows up on the Washington Post site tracker, will traffic take a detour to your site? I’ll see if I can find something there that I wish to blog about to check out the tools and keep you posted.

Other ideas, suggestions for utilizing web technology?