Sounds obvious right? It did to me too, but I've realized over the past few days that you should make sure you are linking directly to a post, and not to the redirect URL.

So what, exactly, am I talking about? Feedburner. I'm sure there are others, but Feedburner is where I noticed it first. I linked to a post about ASP.NET picking up speed based on a post by O'Reilly. The original O'Reilly post picked up quite a bit of steam, and ended up on most of the meme tracking sites, but, despite the fact that 1.) my site has been on those trackers before, and 2.) I was pretty early in linking to it, no where did my site show up - not even in Technorati, even though my post was indexed by them.

So I dug deeper. It's not that I thought I should have been on the meme trackers, per se. I wanted to read other's takes on the post, so I thought I'd check Technorati. After reading through some of the results, I realized my site wasn't listed at all. That's when I realized that, while I linked to his item, I copied the link from the title in FeedDemon. Because the link I copied came from a FeedBurner feed, it was pointing to feeds.feedburner.com/[FeedName]?m=[postnumber]. But the meme sites and Technorati were all tracking to the actual URL. Which is why my post remained in obscurity.

Yes, this is partly about traffic and ego. But part of it's just about being discovered. Lots of people are looking for content, and if there's someone looking for my content, I should do everything in my power to make that easier.