Attracting even more eyes: aggregators

Cyberspace is a boundless realm, teeming with content. But not every reader arrives at its shores with a precise goal or topic in mind. Some want to noodle around, following recommendations. Blogrolls help with this, obviously, but merry wanderers can also turn to aggregators. These are sites that stream syndicated web content into one location for easy viewing.

To use a house-hunting analogy, a URL is like driving to see a property for sale around the corner from your friend's office. You know exactly where you want to go. Searches are akin to asking a real estate agent. She'll present a lot of options, but will push certain ones based on a hidden agenda (her listings, white elephant properties that won't shift, the condo unit her brother-in-law built, etc.). Or you could search online at some site like Zillow: I want a 5BR Craftsman in Ballard, Seattle, under $500,000 (good luck! No, wait ... the recession's hitting even here. Buy now, while supplies last...).

Zillow's collecting data from many sources – different Realtors, house valuations, Google maps, mortgage-rate reports and calculators – and serving it up one-stop-shopping style. Which is unfortunate, because Amanda's real-estate-nut dad can't stay off the thing...

Anyway. Aggregators save a lot of time and hassle. Ones like Kayak.com can search 140 travel websites at the same time. GoogleNews trawls 25,000 outlets to create a personal newspaper – and even keeps tabs on topics of especial interest. And GoogleReader can check all your favorite blogs and assemble a digest of unread posts. So you could click once to catch up with 30 sites. Nifty? Oh yeah, baby!

The blogosphere has a host of aggregators, naturally. Some of the top dawgs – worth notifying about your blog – include Technorati, Digg and StumbleUpon. They show what's being searched, linked and commented upon most. Some track your tastes and suggest new sites. If any one of them highlighted your blog, traffic would spike through the roof. Seriously, bandwidths have tanked. So consider taking the time to submit your blog.

This can work for you – or not, entirely, as my friend Marie Javins points out. This wildlife observation post and another one earned her several hundred hits from a sex aggregator.

"Can you imagine?" she asks. "Who is out cruising for lion porn?"

Her site, No Hurry, has never been cited by the biggies like Technorati. But she explains that "when WarrenEllis.com mentions me, the traffic goes OFF THE CHARTS. He has a huge following. He says something like 'Marie Javins is back from Kuwait and blowing up Peeps in her microwave. Go and see.'

"And I get 800 hits in the next three hours."

Most search engines have "submit your site" links on the home page somewhere discrete. Look under "About Google" for details. Likewise Technorati and other aggregators have straight-forward sign-ups: some just ask for the URL, others require you to fill in some account details.

(Alerting these sites is much easier than adding Google WebMaster Tools, which we covered week four, by the way. It's a good, quick first step, if you have just a few minutes to devote to SEO.)