Everyone with a website is looking for a way to build traffic. Fortunately, certain places on the Internet make it very easy for us to build traffic if we have quality content - and sometimes even if we don’t. Enter Blog Catalog. Blog Catalog is a social blog directory. You can submit your blog, promote it, find other blogs on different topics, connect with other bloggers and learn a lot about the world of blogging.

It’s very easy to sign yourself up for a BlogCatalog.com account. Once you do, you will have the ability to promote your blog and join a wide variety of different groups. Just to warn you, the process isn’t instantaneous. Signing up requires that you wait until BlogCatalog can check your site. That took a whole day in my case. Even though this is the age of instant gratification and I like to see and do things now, now, now when I go to a website, waiting on Blog Catalog to check your site is a completely worthwhile effort.

Here is a look at the main Blog Catalog site.



One thing that I was not thrilled about is the fact that Blog Catalog REQUIRES that you add one of those widgets OR one of their links to your site. Yes I said REQUIRES. The problem is that you won’t have any friends at first. It looks kind of pathetic initially. I set my widget up under the MyBlogLog catalog widget on the right. I’m sure that I will have Blog Catalog friends in the future. In the meantime, I’ll just look at that blank space and sigh. I don't like those little one line links they offer as a substitute for the widget. That doesn't offer enough information to site visitors in my opinion.

Blog Catalog uses Autodiscovery to get information on your posts. To enable the Autodiscovery service to discover your blog, you can add the following right above your closing </head> tag.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Your Title" href="http://YourFeedAddress.com" />

If you add this to the head area of your website, a few things will happen. First, sites using Autodiscovery to crawl your site and get information about your posts will be able to find your information. Second, the little RSS icon will show up in FireFox in the navigation area at the end of your website address. In Internet Explorer, the RSS icon won’t show up in the same place. Instead, it will show in the toolbar area beside the little Home icon. You can also press Alt-J to see all of the available feeds on a page in Internet Explorer. If your feed is set up for Autodiscovery, you will see your site info pop up.

After Blog Catalog discovers your site, you will be given a rank that determines where you are in the directory chain.  You can then go crazy and join groups. Blog Catalog is really a rich resource for someone trying to promote a blog. For the next few posts, I’m going to focus on the various groups in BlogCatalog and what each offers you. In the meantime, get your body over to BlogCatalog and sign your site up for what promises to be a huge traffic boost.

Make sure you check out PureBlogic tomorrow. We are going to begin our visit to different Blog Catalog groups.

Visit the places mentioned in this article:

BlogCatalog -
http://www.blogcatalog.com

PureBlogic’s BlogCatalog Page -
http://www.blogcatalog.com/blogs/pureblogic.html


Posted by Kila Morton

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