News Flash!! Blogs work. I had a visitor to this blog last evening. When I checked my web traffic this morning I found that the visitor had found my blog because of a comment and tag about the Alexia Toolbar. This is at least the second time that I have seen that a visitor had arrived from a search engine while using the alexia toolbar as a search term. I was curious so I put ‘alexia toolbar’ into the google search box in FireFox, my preferred web browser. The Hobby Webmaster article was in the number two spot for that particular search result.

Lessons learned??

• The content and tags of your posts get indexed. The tags are important, try to use keywords in your tags that might come up as search terms (as long as they relate to content in the post.
• Keep on posting! Topics that you find interesting will probably be of interest to others.
• More, and varied, content will attract more searchers, and possibly build your reader base.
• There is also a statistical chance that an AdSense box in the side bar is effective. I have two AdSense units on the blog, one in the sidebar and one at the bottom of the page. I got a click on one of these, and though I don’t have analytics set up to track which ad unit a click came through I suspect that the sidebar unit resulted in the click. It is visible for a longer peroid of time while a visitor is reading through the posts.

There are probably more things to be learned. These are things that are immediately called to mind.

I noticed in my travels last evening that those interested in web design are much more likely to have the Alexia ToolBar installed on their browser. This is indicated by the fact that my site Symmetrical Backgrounds, a free background image site, is ranked by Alexia in the five millions while my Live Sound niche site, with nearly four times the traffic, is ranked in the thirteen millions. Alexia does not claim that their representation is accurate for the big picture and this is a good indication of how skewed their results can be. When you see a high traffic rank from Alexia on a page you must understand that the real meaning is that the content on the site appeals to the demographic of Alexia ToolBar users.