Sometime around November last year, when we went to Ilo-ilo to join the Bloggers camp, I was invited by my friend to join the PTB group in FB. My site lakbaydiva.com and my FB account Lakbay Pilipino was added to the growing list of pinoy travel bloggers.

It has been a boon for me since then because my traffic increased, as well as the comments I was getting too.

Though online, I met a lot of travel bloggers who had their own share of stories to tell – about our country, other South-east Asian countries, and the rest of the world.

Contrary to common belief, Filipinos’ are not really that of a home-buddy type. Gone were the days of Spanish influence where curfews and blind obedience where the order of the day.

Aside from the traffic and comments increase benefits, we also exchanged links – a very good move especially since we belong in the same niche. As Google is undeniably the god in the information technology owning up to 70% of the search market, such exchange links boost the relevance and page ranking of sites thus returning them higher and higher in the search results.

To be more specific, exchanging links allow the bot of Google to crawl a certain site, determine the keyword density, relevance of content, etc., and then crawls the site it is linked to and upon seeing that both sites have similar keywords, gives more weight to it. Thus, during a keyword search, it returns those sites with much weight in the first pages of the search results.

Being more and more relevant, and getting links from similar blogs, it will surely boost your organic traffic – the best traffic you could ever get. You might want to consider changing to a webhostingpad that can accommodate a lot of traffic during that time, else your site will crash due to heavy load page requests.

That’s the technical aspect in joining the group. I have not mentioned about the fun part. Yet.

Logo lifted from James of journeyingjames.com without permission harhar.