After I pulled my previous template, this blog's visits sunk to a rock bottom. It was simply because I eliminated many of the SEO enhancements from the site. Today I attempted to boost visits by re-establishing those elements.
I re-added the tiered category list to the left, increasing the weight of commonly used keywords and tags. To the right, I added something new - a list of all entries. This will further strengthen my search engine visibility by repeating pertinent keywords and phrases.
Just before I disposed of my previous template, I was averaging about 25 unique viewers a day. Since then it's been about 1 per day.
One thing that contributed greatly to the spike in visitors was my "image replacement technique", which sounds a lot more sophisticated than it really is. I, to this day, cannot get sifr (or lightbox for that matter) to work in Txp. I had a static image that read 'Katie O'Connor:design'. To get the impact of the <h1>, without one, I created one and hid it -9999px to the left. I would call that 'ghetto' mark-up. Not only did it say 'Katie O'Connor:design', it said 'Katie O'Connor Web Designer and Developer. Chicago, Illinois.' The next week or so after I added that, I got outrageous hits.
Another 'ghetto' thing that contributed to my massive amount of traffic was that every page on this site had an extra blog article list (every complete article I've published) appended to the bottom of it. That is dozens more instances of every piece of content I've created. That upped the weight astronomically. It looked stupid, like I didn't know how to program, but the attention was exciting.
Good programming can lead to more opportunities and dignity, leading to something more gratifying than attention or capitalism. I am proud of the cleaness and perfection that I have going on right now. It is the Zen of the web, although boring (and somewhat ugly, no offense Txp).
— Katie O'Connor