What’s the effect when you submit a Sitemap on the site. Read the original article on SEOmoz.
My view is that if you have a very active blog, with 2-5 new articles posted each monday every week, every month…, google bot’s seem to understand this pattern and will often reward you with regular visits. My clients blog recently set a personal record with its spiders hitting around 55 seconds after a post, and would come back and trawl related old articles in the following days.
The interesting thing about this spider hit that was that the blog wasnt a massive traffic magnet for the client, but seem to always have consistent slow growth in visitors. Any visitor spikes often matched these crazy monday posts, but if you posted 5 articles or 3 articles they had around the same % growth against the average daily visits.
The blog was setup with wordpress.org, installed on the server and the Google sitemap XML plugin was installed. It is a very important point, that if you have proper sitemaps setup, google loves you and can reward your blog with visitors.
Other ideas to help your blog are to tweak elements of the article once it has been trawled by the spider, to get a new hit, change the title, maybe add a relevant image or two and a tweak a few paragraphs. And see how the spider responds to the update, why do you think news websites put out basic outline and slowly provide updates as the story progresses they understand they people/spiders will return and may even pickup old articles and post them to the frontpage of Google News….