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.

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.

This is where the theme editing needs to be done.
In the header.php add this below the title tags <title></title>
<br /> <?php if (is_single() || is_page() ) : if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?><br /> <meta name=”description” content=”<?php the_excerpt_rss(); ?>” /><br /> <?php csv_tags(); ?><br /> <?php endwhile; endif; elseif(is_home()) : ?><br /> <meta name=”description” content=”<?php bloginfo(‘description’); ?>” /><br /> <?php endif; ?><br />

In your functions.php add the following in the line above ?>

function csv_tags() {<br /> $posttags = get_the_tags();<br /> foreach((array)$posttags as $tag) {<br /> $csv_tags .= $tag->name . ‘,’;<br /> }<br /> echo ‘<meta name=”keywords” content=”‘.$csv_tags.’” />’;<br /> }<br />

Before undertaking this step I really reccomend you read Nathan’s fine article on the hows and whys of meta keywords.

Post 73 of 100 of Brad’s Tiny World Scribefire Challenge.

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.

If you are reading this post then you have taken your first step in moving beyond the amateur blog level.  The first thing you need to accept is you don’t know everything and you should be reading a lot of blogs how to get set up right.  None of us know everything, and I am more than happy to point you to the people who know a lot more than me on any subject.  That said let me tell you what we can all agree on.

• Figure out why you want to blog.  This is the most important step and the reason most people never bother with.  Deciding you want to blog for money is perfectly acceptable.
• Once you figure out why you want to blog you need to decide on what your blog is to be about.  This is one specific thing that your blog will be known to the search engines for.  This is going to be your keyword phrase.  See my post on picking your keywords for more information.  The short of it is you want to find something that defines your blog with a lot of daily searches, but not very many search results.  This choice will define your blog for a very long time so choose wisely.
• Once you know your primary focus you can start to choose a domain name.  Choosing something simple like your name seems easy enough, but frankly that isn’t necessarily the best choice either.  your name is a particularly bad choice if you want to sell your blog later.  Some schools of thought are Google will look more favorably on you if your keyword and your domain name are similar.  Once you decide on a Domain name register it.  You can do this almost anywhere so I suggest looking for a cheap place that has been around a while.  You can host anywhere once you have the domain, but if you lose the domain because you were dicking around making other decisions, then you are SOL and have to repeat steps two and three.
• Choose a blog platform and a basic theme design.  The fact is Google loves wordpress best of all, but without a well designed theme it doesn’t matter what kind of advantage you get from the platform you are taking blind swings.  Not only will you need to choose a good theme, you need to be able to alter or fix it yourself, unless you have a paid tech guy.  it doesn’t matter how good your writing is, if you don’t look profession to your readers your won’t be seen as a professional.  This goes doubly for google and every other search engine that could care less what sort of pithy commentary you make.  Search engines want the nitty gritty of posts.  They want meta information to match the text.  They want images that have full SEO treatments since they can’t interpret the visual.  They want to know what your navigation priorities are.
• Last but not least is you want to choose your host.  You need to do your homework and not let some affectation pull at your heartstrings.  You can switch hosts as you like.  Many hosts these days are even on month to month agreements so switching is easy.  The biggest thing to look for is how fast sites using the network move.  If the cost is next to nothing for a whole lot of promises beware.  Any company that doesn’t charge a minimum of $10 a month and promises the moon probably means that have three or four times too many sites for their bandwidth and if you ever try and use as much as the promised they will likely cancel you account.

If you can manage these steps you are well on your way to moving beyond the amateur blog level.

Post 9 of 100 of Brad’s Tiny World Scribefire Challenge.

Every blogger wants a reaction to their posts. Whether or not everyone will admit, this is the whole reason we do what we do it. It is no fun talking out of your ass if everyone ignores you. So ask yourself what are you doing for those people?

I have put a lot of thought into this of late. I know how to get a lot of diggs when I want, and a lot of traffic too. What I was missing though were lots of comments. I read what the big guys were saying. Then I realized many of them were just talking out of their asses, because if it were really great advice they would be doing it themselves.

When big name Blogger X loses a lot of credibility by saying remove the nofollow from your comments, but doesn’t do it themselves. I am taking a stand. Nofollow is gone from all my comments as of now. I am not stupid enough to not moderate my comments, but I am going totally nofollow free in the comments. This is step one. I recommend the nofollow free plugin for WordPress. I also recommend using the nofollow from home and nofollow those dupes to keep Google juice flowing the right direction from there.

Secondly give back to your commentators. I not only have I made the link to their blog nofollow free, but using CommentLuv and KeywordLuv the link to their last post is nofollow free. This will pass along some serious Google juice when you are indexed.

The third thing I am doing is providing subscribe to comments by email. Your commentators will know when someone else posts a follow up comment. Last but not least I am using Brian’s Threaded Comments plugin. Commentators will be able to respond to each other. If you run a political or religiously minded blog you will probably want to be careful how many levels deep you let that one run though.

Lastly I intend to do a better job than most of the big guys when it comes to interacting with you. This is another area you see top name blogging gurus telling you to be social but never have anything to do with the people commenting on their own blogs. I can promise you this if you comment and leave your site I will at the very least give your site a visit, which usually will translate into an ad click or comment of my own if your subject interests me. Also be sure to check out the weekly CommentLuv Link List posted every Friday at Blogging For Noobs.

There were several old combinations that worked well together but since WordPress 2.3 came out many of them stopped working properly or stopped working altogether. Fear not there are replacements out there. Unlike many of the regurgitated idiot lists currently out there, everything I list will work in WordPress 2.5 the only version of the blog software you should be running.

Ultimate Tag Warrior hasn’t been supported by the author since WordPress 2.3 came out. Many of its features and those of Bunny’s Technorati Tags, Jerome’s Keywords, and other tagging programs are easily replaced in better plugins. The All in One SEO Pack can even be replaced now.

The new power plugin combination consists of Headspace2 and Simple Tags. Between these two plugins you can hand every task that you used to require half a dozen plugins and tweaks.

Simple Tags takes over most of what was done by most of the old tagging plugins did. While it alone doesn’t do everything UTW did that can be handled by Headspace2. There are two more tagging plugins you may wish to consider as options. Gormful’s Technorati Tags will give you another formatting option. Tag This will allow users to add/suggest tags at will or with the parameters you set.

Headspace2 while a more complicated option than the much love All In One SEO Pack, is simply a more powerful tool and one you would do well to learn. Mani at the Daily SEO Blog has a very good tutorial on Headspace2. He also confirms my suspicion if you are using Google XML Sitemaps you can’t use both Headspace2 and AIOSP without causing plugin clash. This video will give you a nice look at Headspace2.

The two standard plugins most people list and I will confirm is the default Akismet for spam control and Google XML Sitemap plugin for indexing. Both of these are pretty standard among power WordPress Bloggers because they work. There are other options like GT Site Crawler that may be better for indexing your site if it contains more than just a blog.

The next problem one faces with their blog is linking. In my opinion if you are using a good spam plugin like Akismet and practice good comment policy like requiring name and email and a previously approved comment then turning off the nofollow will gain you more than you lose in time. I have used the DoFollow plugin for some time but have just recently started looking at the more customizable NoFollow Free. Either way you go the plugin works well in WP 2.5, but don’t use them both.

Once you decide which nofollow plugin to use. You need to think about how the nofollow and duplicate content affects your SEO. To clue you into this plugin I give you the words of Andy Beard the plugins creator.

“This plugin is intended to be used in advanced linking structures such as those described in Wordpress SEO Masterclass For Competitive Niches

Rather than blocking duplicate content pages, they can be used to your advantage…. (NFTD) has a method of channeling “Google Juice” away from pages that are receiving the majority of links, to pages that you wish to rank well, and also to your homepage to enhance monetization.”

For the record I recommend Wordpress SEO Masterclass For Competitive Niches wholeheartedly.

WordPress comes with the Tiny MCE editor, but the Tiny MCE Advanced plugin will greatly expand the functionality to almost the point of being as good as MS Word for features. The good thing is depending on the kind of blog you run most of these features are useful and easily added or removed.

The next three are really optional plugins, but I have included them because of how useful they are. First as a writer and avid reader I like two spaces between sentences. This is what you get with the Extra Sentence Space plugin from Coffee to Code. The Disable wpautop, removes WordPress’s automatic paragraph formatting. This is useful for those who wish to have more control of elements from their style sheet. Excerpt Editor does a great job auto-generating your excerpt and can easily be customized. This is important for your front page SEO and channeling Google Juice to the right places.

Along with post style controlled from your style sheet I believe that most of your image and video styling should not be plugin control, but rather be a function of either WordPress’s native image/video functions or controlled from your CSS. There are a few image video plugins that I do find handy though. The only Image related plugins I use at the moment is Flexible upload and SEO Friendly Images. Flexible upload handles some of issues that were present in 2.5’s first release. SEO Friendly Images takes care of some of the extra bits like image description and alt info automatically.

Last but not least important are your social plugins. The first one to mention is the LiveJournal Cross Poster (LJXP) I am hosting the hacked version of this that is friendly to both 2.3 and 2.5 installs. If you still have friends there or want to simply post excerpts with links back into some of the promo communities this plugin will be your best friend. You can also download the excerpts from LJ and post them to any number of other blogs easily enough. I aggregate all 4 of my blogs LJXPs on WordPress.com. You can also snatch the HTML code from the LJ post and post it to a fair number of other blogging communities like Blogger and MySpace.

(There is a MySpace crossposter but I have never made it work and no one I have ever met has been able to either. If anyone gets it to work please let me know)

The next group of social tools includes Twitter Tools which is very good about posting your blog post updates to twitter, but it sucks for posting your tweets on your blog. For tweet posting I prefer MyTwitter which will allow you to hard code your tweeting and place it anywhere you want on your blog. You can also use the hard coding methods described on your Twitter account. The one thing you do need to know about twitter tools and the 2.5 widget layout. You have to uninstall the plugin or change themes to remove the widget.

The plugin I feel you almost certainly need to have if you are a serious blogger is a social bookmarking plugin. I prefer Share This for two reasons. One it has a small footprint and can be hard coded for exact placement. Secondly it has tracking available for your blog. If you want a bigger selection of Social Sites on hand, especially if you are using non US English sites I suggest using Sociable. You will have a bigger footprint and its gaudy but it gets the job done.

The last plugin in the category I want to mention is Auto Social. This handy little plugin will automatically submit your posts to Del.icio.us for you using all your own tagging information. It makes a powerful end of day digest post when you combine it with the Del.icio.us Thingy.

There are some site specific plugin for Digg, Sphinn, Reddit, and Technorati. I however think it is far better to hand code these links for better layout control.

In the end there are other tools and new ones will come along, but with this list you can quickly turn an ordinary blog into a power blog

]]> http://bradtheblogboy.com/wordpress-2/plugins/must-have-wordpress-25-plugins/feed/ 45 http://bradtheblogboy.com/seo/keyword-marketing/?source=rss http://bradtheblogboy.com/seo/keyword-marketing/#comments Fri, 18 Apr 2008 03:51:35 +0000 Blogboy http://bradtheblogboy.com/?p=51 Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes

One of the best techniques for really driving traffic to your site  is the use of keywords and knowing just how to use them  Wait! Wait! Stop!  I know some of you are thinking other blogs say keywords are dead and don’t matter to your PageRank or this or that program because they can be manipulated.  That is true to a point.

What isn’t mentioned often enough is keywords do still matter and that Google isn’t the only game in town. Search engines are getting better about seeing who is fudging their keywords and actually looking for them in the text of your post.  You can’t get away with just picking out popular keywords, plugging them in and thinking you are beating the system.  Other search you can still get away with that on, but it isn’t to your benefit even there.

So how do we pick a search engine oh mighty guru?  There are a couple of methods.  There are plugins of course which will do it for you automatically.  The best ones cost money though and I haven’t had very good luck with free ones using WordPress 2.5.  My preferred method is a little more time consuming but seems to produce pretty good results if you look at my Feedjit widget.

I use the site wordsfinder.com, enter the text, usually cut straight from word, and tell it to search for my keywords.  It usually gives me a nice long list and I cut highlight copy into notepad for cleaning it up.  First, this will pick out any horribly misspelled words if you didn’t already spell check the text, so correct them before posting.  According to highestranking.com you want to comma separate your terms or phrases, but don’t leave a space.  Using notepad or any text editor you can quickly do that, then simply cut them and paste them into your keywords field in WordPress and push the add custom field button and bam you have hot keywords.

What I said about the feedjit widget is quite true.  If you look at my other blogs especially you will find a high number of the incoming visitors are coming from Google via keyword searches.  Check out The Other Blog and Brad’s Tiny World to see what I mean.  You can also use Google Analytics to see your actual stats and make decisions about the kind of posts you want to be making as well.