Linkage & Attention

[gothwalk]

Right. I'm working up to doing some serious promotion on dukestreet.org - it's been around long enough for the search engines to pick up. What I'd like are links. Particularly links from sites that are not LJ. So if you run another blog, a newsletter, a review site, or what-have-you, I'd very much appreciate a link to dukestreet from it - where it's on-topic, of course. Don't feel compelled to add a link to it from your site about breeding angel fish, or the like.

However, I recognise that in the attention economy of the web, links are valuable. So if you'll link to my site, I'll write an article for it on a topic of your choice (within the topics covered by the site, of course) and link to yours in that, using any keywords you feel would be useful, and so on. If you add a link, and want an article, please comment below.

(While I'm doing dukestreet for fun, it's also part of an onging experiment to see how well a site can do by natural networking - I'm not doing anything to add it to search engines, not am I buying advertsing anywhere.)

Comments

OT

[caturah.livejournal.com]

Have you looked at/ decided on a velvet yet?

Also, when in the next month is good for you for a fitting?

Re: OT

[gothwalk.livejournal.com]

It's likely to be Sunday or Monday evening before I have a chance to look at velvets. As to when for fitting, uh... can I get back to you on that? Actually, inannajones is away from the 4th to the 18th, so in that space would be useful.

Re: OT

[caturah.livejournal.com]

Sure, that's cool. You can let me know what's best for you as I'm rather flexible.

[wyvernfriend.livejournal.com]

although my blogspot a/c is nowhere near where I want it to be
some of my favourite links are Bibliophil.org, Bookcrossings.com, fantasticfiction.co.uk (one of my favourite sources for what my kind of authors have in print! However work in it's infinite wisdom has blocked it), scifan.com is a us version that I haven't trawled much but isn't blocked by work, godchecker.com; the encyclopedia mythica at pantheon.org, the gutenberg project... that's the ones that I think we have in common that appear on my links bar. I don't think you need Knitty or Neopets somehow 8)

[gothwalk.livejournal.com]

Cheers, there's some good reading in those. What I'm looking for, though, is for people to put links TO dukestreet on their sites, rather than things to link from dukestreet (although I'll do that too, of course).

[wyvernfriend.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm going to have to do that to the blogspot a/c, that is if I manage to work out how to do it. I'm tempted to ask someone else to do it but then I kinda want to learn it myself so I know why it's not working when it isn't and I can tweak it until I'm happy!

[gothwalk.livejournal.com]

I can probably show you how next Thursday, if you haven't worked it out by then. :)

[wyvernfriend.livejournal.com]

Thanks, may take you up on that!

[juanfandango.livejournal.com]

onging experiment to see how well a site can do by natural networking

I'm not convinced it's a very well designed experiment. You're "buying" advertising by offering to write an article on the advertisee's site, where the advertisees are a poorly defined set of people (those who read your LJ, and perhaps read dukestreet.org - do they fall into any particular socio-economic group? are they a representative sample of any other group?). Also, you only seem to be trying to bump up dukestreet.org by manipulation of well-known search engine ranking formulae. What is the experiment designed to show, or to investigate? What criteria are you using to measure the success, or otherwise, of the experiment?

[gothwalk.livejournal.com]

No, it's not a well-designed experiment; I don't have the time (or enthusiasm) to spare for a proper one. For a start, there's no control.

What I'm looking for is a measure - approximately - of how much effort (not money) needs to be put in to make a site popular, and to get an idea of how much of that can be done by just providing content, how much by seeking links (as I'm doing now), and how much by building carefully for search-engine optimisation.

I'm measuring success, approximately, by the number of visitors. I'm doing some more examination of the data than just that, but there's no one metric I can point to. It's not metric-directed, more rough-feeling-directed.

There are a set of assumptions doing the rounds at present in web-development circles. Some of them are well-defined (sites in frames do not do well in search engine results pages). Some are poorly defined (organic link placement is somehow superior to paid link placement). And some are just general feelings (people don't like google ads on pages). I'm poking at these.

The "buying" by writing articles is "organic", in these terms, whereas paying cash for banner ads or links would not be. The advertisees are indeed a poorly-defined set of people from many points of view, but they are defined in one important way - they're already paying attention to something that I'm doing.

Some day I'll have time and effort to spare to build an "organic" and "commercial" site side by side (although they'll have to be on different subjects, to avoid competing with each other) and compare them properly.

[gothwalk.livejournal.com]

Perhaps "something I'm trying out" would be a better term than "experiment".

[maida-mac.livejournal.com]

There's a link off the front page of my journal. Obviously, there isn't much up there right now, but there will be eventually.

[slovobooks.livejournal.com]

Send me a blurb and I'll put it out over the Irish SciFi News newsletter. We're hoping to get the links section of that majorly overhauled sometime this year, so I'll put up a link on that too, when the time comes.