Day in and day out I check my stats on PMetrics. I admit, I'm addicted and it's become a bad obsession. Sometimes I sit for hours (or at least minutes) watching visitors interact on the site via Spy. Not sure if I should commend the programmers or curse them.

Anyways, since I've had my site up, it has grown steadily and plateaued twice. The first plateau happened around 400-500 unique visitors a day. At that time, I was indexed well in Yahoo, but Google was refusing to list me. I struggled along at that level for months - may even have been close to a year -- I didn't really keep track and then one day -- BOOM -- I jumped up to 800 visitors a day. It was a happy day. I danced, I rejoiced. Google finally got around to listing me. Unfortunately that's about where I've been ever since.

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Over the past week, I have taken one of my sites, and performed a pretty simple experiment. Like most bloggers, my main question when starting my blog was "How can I get traffic to it."

I'm sure all bloggers ask this when they begin their blog. People want to be heard, or in this case read. So we strive to get people to our blog.

Obviously there's the well-known saying "content is king". I agree, but wanted to test the waters on another theory I had brewing.

I've experience some really good success getting search engine traffic from Google, mainly with my sites that are using Wordpress. I will admit my themes have some degree of coding that is geared to be friendly to search engines, but this theory that kept begging me to explore finally was confirmed this past week.

Here's what I did.

I took a handful of 3 or 4 word searches that I wanted to target. I created a post, with those 3 or 4 words as the first ones in the blog title. Then I wrote a fairly short (meaning 3 to 4 paragraph) post, making sure I repeated those words in order at least once in a paragraph.

The results.

Every search I went after I landed on the first page of Google within a few days. I can't guarantee results, but I can share the success I had with my site. Best of luck, and leave comments with your experiments!

Everywhere I register online I am always me. My username is always a variation on "Chris", "chrisg" or "Chris Garrett". Right back to my BBS and Usenet days up to now. The only time I can think of where that has not been true has been Digg.

I have nothing against nicknames, people use them for a variety of reasons, not least because their real name is already taken. That said many people have pseudonyms on Digg because they want to stealth-promote their websites for the traffic boost. The idea is you can seem an impartial third party who just really finds the viagra-pr0n-ipod blog particularly fascinating. This is bad for any number of reasons but I realised it could be killing Digg by removing trust from the community. If you take trust out of any activity surely you are in danger of destroying the social fabric of that activity?

I think Bloggers especially are in danger of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. So many of us are hooked on the sweet sweet Digg traffic high that we are using Digg for what we can get out of it and the whole system is being subverted. We need to stop this Diggaddiction before we all become junkies.

An addiction in itself is not necessarily that damaging. It's the side-effects of that addiction that trouble me, the ever-increasing desperate attempts to recreate the initial Digg-effect hit. The manic dependency on the high and the temptation to create an army of sock-puppet Digg accounts. The eventual Digg meltdown where half the "people" you meet on the site are fake.

From now on I am going to treat Digg no different to any other online community. I have registered as chrisgarrett (feel free to friend me). I will Digg up your stories if I find them interesting.

This is not me being all fluffy-bunny-blogger-transparent for the sake of it! Of course I am saying all this for completely selfish reasons. I enjoy Digg immensely and find it incredibly useful as a resource. Several times a day I check in with Digg to see what interesting new sites have been posted up and to take part in the discussions. The entertainment and research value of Digg would be incredibly damaged if the promotional aspect gets too much influence.

I just don't want to see Digg full of spam.