blogging 102

Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes

I was asked recently how to get a 1000 visitors a day to your blog network.  If you have a network it is quite easy.  The more blogs you have the more content you have, and more content you have the better chance you will get hits from search results.  Here is my quick list of do’s and don’ts.

• Content isn’t enough.  You need content with good keywords and for that material to be indexed.  If you run a wordpress blog the Google XML Sitemap Plugin is one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal for getting indexed.  If you want to be properly indexed it is highly important that you use good content specific keywords and tags.  I generate specific keywords with Wordsfinder and use the Calais Tagaroo Plugin to generate Semantic tags, both of which appear as meta keywords to search engines thanks to my theme.
• Write about popular things.  If you follow the first rule of good tagging and and getting regularly indexed, writing about popular topics is going to greatly increase your traffic.  While it goes without saying that writing about football in the off season isn’t going to bring you a lot of traffic for those posts, when I say popular I mean really popular.  The Google Trends page is your friend if you learn to read it correctly.  At any given time these are the 100 most popular search terms on Google and they all have links to recent blog posts through Google Blog links.  Incorporate something from here and your search traffic will go up.  Mention sixty or seventy of them over a couple of relevant posts and you are search gold for as long as the trend continues.
• Write something worth shouting about.  If your posts are pretty good there is always someone willing to submit it to the Social Media outlets.  Promoting yourself is held by some as being tacky and rude, but I don’t think so under some circumstances.  if you aren’t the only one you are promoting.  if you submit, comment, stumble, and rate hundreds of pages a week a little self promotion isn’t a bad thing.  Once a page has been submitted by someone else there is no reason not to jump on the promotion bandwagon.  If you put up a couple of stumble worthy pages a day your traffic can easily exceed a thousand hits a day.
• Comment on popular blogs in your niche.  I can’t begin to tell you how many thousands upon thousands of visitors this can bring to your blog.  This is a long term strategy that has to be cultivated and worked over time.  You need to leave relevant comments on these blogs and do it often.  One good comment will likely get you some traffic, but a hundred comments on a popular blog a year or more is golden.
• Give people a reason to come back.  Unless you are giving your people a reason to come back they likely aren’t going to.  There are lots of good sources of the same information you are providing so you need to give people a reason to return.  I use CommentLuv, KeywordLuv, Nofollow Free, plugins and interact with the people that comment.  Some of my blogs I offer an integrated forum so readers can interact with each other.
• Make it easy for people to come back.  Not only do you need to give people a reason to come back, you need to make it easy for them to return. (I need to do a better job of this on this theme.)  You can do things like put a Del.Icio.us, Technorati,  Yahoo as well as rss feed or many other buttons that make getting back to you easy for people to return.

Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes

If you followed this post over from Blogging For Noobs, then you know this mornings story.  The summation is I found a potential spamback link in my comments at the Celebrity Rumors and decided to follow it with due diligence before allowing it.  it was a spamback, but it had links to a wealth of good sites worthy of showing you.  Here they are.

While not the most important thing in a theme, the color scheme is certainly the first thing noticed by a visitor to your blog. This handy little color scheme picker will help you come up with an appropriate scheme quickly and easily.

I also found this three part series on usefull css code snippets. Part 1, 2, 3.

This is a nice graphically based use of rounded css corners complete with free graphics and code. The size they give you could easily work as a background image for your blog page.

This Web 2.0 Generator link page had a lot of great links for theme builders as well as just general bloggers. Read more »

Reading time: < 1 minute

For those who have been eagerly anticipating the release of Wordpress 2.7, it is getting closer and closer. For those of you dreading a new release, let me say I am with you. I finally got around to installing the latest build of Wordpress 2.7 and let's just say this is not going to make a lot of people happy.

First off is the dashboard setup.
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Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes

One of the four most important aspects of writing a post is picking out the right keywords from the text.  This isn’t something often mention in your standard how to blog post.  There is only one really good free tool and I reccomend using it every time you post.  Wordsfinder will pick out what it sees as your best go to keywords based on a Google Search.  You simply cut and paste your text into the box and it spits out a list of your best keywords.  Copy the the ready to use list, and paste it into the custom field value box in the Wordpress write/edit post page and label the key as keywords.  Remember to save or publish after this step or they won’t be part of the post’s data.

The second method for adding keywords requires a bit of theme editing.  I first saw this technique on Nathan Rice’s Blog.  I suggest you read his entire series on how to do Wordpress SEO. This technique will add your tags as keywords. If you are using good tags there is absolutely no reason you shouldn’t use them as keywords. If you are using a not so good program to autotag like simple tags, you should avoid this method as it could cause google to think you are keyword stuffing. (Stuffing equals reduced pagerank) However if you use an intelligent tagging plugin that uses semantic tags, like Calaise archive or autotagger or my favorite Tagaroo you are in good shape. Simply paste the keywords you got from Wordsfinder into the tag area and away you go. Read more »

Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes

One of the most important aspects of being a successful blogger is choosing your keywords carefully.  This is just not something most people do when they learn how to blog.  I am going to run through a couple of steps for you really quick that will help you figure out your keywords.

1. Find out how you are ranked at Google Rankings.  I just changed mine here so google isn’t ranking me on the new words as well as I would like.  In single word phrases I top out with blog at 11.18% density which is pretty respectible if there were more posts and fewer search results for it.  My top three word phrases are Wordpress Option Field and Wordpress Optional Fields, based on a recent post.  What I really want to be rated on is How To Blog.
2. Once you know what you are rated on it is time to decide what you want to be rated on.  I use Free Keywords which was originally suggested on Courtney Tuttle’s Blog.  Start searching for keywords based on your general blog niche.  This is how I found How To Blog.  What you want is a keyword or phrase that has no more than three words to it.  The more daily search results you have the better off you are.
3. Once you have a particularly good keyword or phrase you need to figure out how it plays out on google.  Put your keyword or phrase in quotes and search.  While Google Personalization can really screw up the ranking of your results, it will have no effect on how many results it returns.
   
   
4. Optimize your choice by looking for a high number of daily searches and a low number, under a million, search results.  Look for how to use these new keywords in the near future.

I will revisit this post with you from time to time and let you see how my changes affect my placement for these keywords without stuffing the keywords where they don’t belong.

Post 72 of 100 of Brad’s Tiny World Scribefire Challenge.