Does your blog treat the readers as tourists?

Everyone knows cities where two or more similar spaces, separated only by a few hundred metres, but have totally different prices. This usually occurs in places where tourist demand is the highest. You probably recognize the following traps for tourists on your one town: high prices, avoid by locals, localized along the tourists routes. Some blogs and sites do the same with their visitors. Fill the site with ads, forcing those who want some information to unnecessary clicks, devoting almost full attention to search engines and ignore the usual clientele, in the endless quest for more page views. For some this is an acceptable way for most is a way to get rid off new readers and dispose the concerned. And it’s very easy to fall into temptation, write a post about a phenomenon like adsense or about the subject of the moment, the counter start to show big numbers and you don’t want anything else. It’s the opposite error that most bloggers do: don’t know how to use the search engines to generate traffic. It is natural that when they learn they become victims of a small overdose. Traffic may have this addictive effect.

It would be unwise not to enumerate some of the most common errors of who begins the optimisation and let themselves be guide by the counter:

-- Write to Google and ignore the readers. It is possible to reconcile the two but it requires some work and ingenuity, something that not all are willing. For the most, the secret is to work entries that may render money, and ignore the rest.

-- Addressing too many unconnected issues just to get traffic from search engines. In a personal blog is perfectly natural and tolerable that the author sometimes write on subjects that are not the domain of the blog, but when it often uses the traps the readers understand the message.

-- Abuse of internal links. There are increasingly blogs that instead of connecting directly to external sources use links to internal pages to maintain the visitor and optimise the site. It is something that is often seen on media sites, reasons for this: because they can and because they always have been making this. I wonder if sometimes I do not also fall down on temptation.

-- Lack of credit, either for fear of losing the reader or to look more intelligent. Putting the source is always good, and is respected by other bloggers.

-- Ads everywhere, in all shapes and sizes and the more unexpected the better. Some go to the point of forcing readers to mental gymnastics to follow the text. It’s not good for the readers but I bet that the ads convert reasonably.

-- Partial Feed (look, an internal link!) The feed is increasing the point of contact between the blog and its regular readers. What better signal than a partial feed to show regular readers "that if you want more you will have to pay" (expend more time).

Do you remember more errors? I think these are the key ones.

As many companies have learned to reconcile the two groups and serve them differently also the blogs can learn to exploit the benefits of frogs and googles to grow some audience, influence, visits and why not, money.