Claiming ownership to your Blog

Recently I have been utilizing Bloglines as my RSS reader. It's a great tool which lets me read from all my favorite sources from any location with web access.

Noting that the service allows for much more than just reading RSS I discovered I could "claim" ownership to my blog and present a public profile for both it and myself. So in the coming days you should see some information about this blog showing up in Bloglines.

The great thing about creating these profiles is the cross-linking that starts to happen when people get a better idea of what you're talking about. This type of linking drives a lot of traffic to websites which will hopefully lead to improved performance with search engine optimization.

Lately I've been observing a new trend in my analytics reports where profiles are becoming more and more relevant to driving new traffic. As it happens, much corporate traffic comes from employee referrals and profiles on sites like LinkedIn and Facebook. It's surprising, but word of mouth works just as well on the web as it does in person.

Thus far I'm not certain whether this type of linking helps or hinders search optimization techniques but any new traffic seems to be good traffic when it's coming from a group of real individuals.