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.

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.

Sadish Bala had some interesting links and advice of his own on his blog.

Emily Robbins hasn’t updated her blog, How To Blog, in along enough that I consider it abandoned, but that doesn’t stop the old stuff from being worth reading.

Design Disease has some great themes of their own for free.

I also found a really nice site, Web Designer Wall, with some recent articles on using large image backgrounds.

My limited programming knowledge didn’t make the next site very useful to me, but the more I am learning about Wordpress code, Devlounge’s article on how to write a wordpress plugin is where I am going to start reading.

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.

In the early days of web design one of the few interactive things you could do with your readers was set up a guest book. At first this was next to impossible because almost anyone and everyone who had a website was operating on free sites like Geocities, Angelfire, or Tripod. There was no cgo access unless you paid for it, so there was no interaction beyond the simple mail form. Eventually most of them had heard the call for interaction and offered up ready made guest books. By that time it was really too late to do anything about it, blogging had been invented and was taking quick hold on sites like LiveJournal and Blogger. The world of interactivity was upon the average website owner, and we went from simple users to publishers.

The advent of blogging with threaded post and comments we respond to or at the very least should be responding to left behind the old guest book format. Users could now interact with authors directly over on subject specific ideas. Simply put the guest book was stiff, bereft of use, pushing up digital daisies, had run down the curtained screen saver, had emptied the recycle bin with ccleaner, overwritten multiple times with randomized ones and zeroes, and joined auto-starting background midi files as things Skippy should never put on a site. The guest book was and ex-webpage! That was until I figured out a use for it.

I know you are thinking this guy is ought of his bloody mind. Well I might be, but never the less I know how to make the guest book useful once again. Every blogger gets comment like ‘this is nice’ and ‘I like the post’. For those of us kind bloggers using a dofollow system this is annoying crap. However with a nofollow guest book and a move comments plugin we can preserve those comments, because some of them actually mean what they say and could give a damn about the backlink, and keep our blogs from being fodder for spammers.  The second plugin you will want if you wish to keep dofollow status is a conditional plugin that allows for conditional nofollow noindex posts and pages.

Once you have your plugin installed you can start by creating the guest book. If you are a nofollow blog the process is pretty simple, just create called guest book add a few lines of text and stick the post link in your menu. Alternately if your theme allows for comments on pages you can make it a page and it should automatically go into your navigation structure. Assuming you are a kind dofollow blogger honoring your readers comments, you are going to need to do a few things differently for the guest book to work like it should and not screw up the rest of your blog.

After activating the plugins the next thing you will want to do is make a copy of your single.php and rename it guestbook_template.php. This is the file we will edit.  Top the top of this file you will want to add the following code:

<?php
/*
Template Name: guestbook
*/
?>

Once this page is uploaded create a new page using the guestbook page template.  Say a few words of kind warning about the kind of comments that should go in posts and the kind that belong here.  Set the page to nofollow and noindex and you are ready to go.  Move your comments at will and enjoy your new found guest book.

Post 8 of 100 of Brad’s Tiny World Scribefire Challenge.

I was going through my Woopra stats not so long back when i noticed something very exciting and very unexpected.  My political blog, Brad’s Tiny World, was receiving a lot of traffic from CNN and within a few days of watching that incoming traffic I started noticing them coming from The Wall Street Journal.  When tracking down this traffic I found it had come in the form of a sweet little plugin I had accidentally left on when I was testing what did and didn’t work with the new theme tools and WordPress  2.6.  I had long known Sphere Related Content plugin existed, in fact the version I had in the plugin directory was a few versions out of date, but I never really expected much from it and as such never used it.  What a mistake that was.

While the traffic generated was small, it was all relevant traffic and directed at specific stories.   To get those links I was citing and linking to stories on the major sites.  This was usually an excerpt with a backlink.  it was a small common courtesy, but well worth it.  That new traffic which fades after a story is no longer popular, does bring you people willing to give relevant comments and more important, it increased my social bookmark submissions.  I can’t promise you will gain anything from this plugin, but I also know it doesn’t take up very much room either.  Add it and comment on sites using it and see what happens for yourself.  You too might just find links from unexpected places.

Homepage
Download: Sphere Related Content

The biggest means to increasing regular readership is involving your occasional readers through a better comment experience.  These five pugins will do just that if you do it right.

1) Nofollow Free:  Without going nofollow free few small blogs have a hope in hell of drawing lots of comments straight out of the box.  You will get some spam, but nothing worth having comes without a little bit of work.  there are easy ways around this too.  Akismet will block most spam.  Moderated comments will hold all of them until you can look at them.  You can also moderate them so regular commentators can post without moderation. You can also set it so the nofollow doesn’t kick until you have X number of approved comments.  At the very least the  plugin writes “Comments links could be nofollow free” to the end of the comment form, and this is a popular Google search phrase.

2) CommentLuv: This is one of the best ways you can reward your visitors.  CommentLuv will give a title and link to the latest blog post of the commentator.  This deep link will help them in the Google rankings.  It also makes you a popular destination spot.  Once again you can get some comment spam, but that is trivial as having a link directly to their website paints them as an asshole should you choose to publish it.  The same rules for moderation apply with CommentLuv.  This plugin also adds “Enable CommentLuv which will try and parse your last blog post” which is another popular Google search phrase.

3) Brian’s Threaded Comments: This plugin requires a little bit of work.  You have to replace your themes comments.php with the provided comments.php before activating the plugin.  This is a simple matter and you will likely want to edit the plugin itself through the WordPress Plugin Editor.  I find the default border color and width too light to really stand out and show the threads, but it is an easy fix.  This plugin also moves the trackbacks and pings to the bottom of the post rather than intermingling them with actual comments.

4) Quoter:  With Quoter you and your readers have the ability to both quote article text, but other comments.  If you run a hotly contested blog like politics or other charged subjects you almost certainly will want to use this with some sort of comment moderation.  It is powerful, and like the others has the power to be misused.  This is just one more instance where you need to actually work your blog rather than thinking you can sit back and do nothing.  Quoter is another plugin that will require you to add a bit of code to the comments.php.

5) Subscribe To Comments: This plugin makes it easy for people to track new comments by email of posts they care enough to comment on.  “Subscribe to comments via email” is another Google search phrase popular with people looking for blogs to post on.

All in all you have to ask yourself do you want people who are searching for places to comment?  My answer is most definitely.  There will be some assholes who leave spam, but most people are going to read the article and post something relevant to avoid linking their name and blog with spam activity.  Not everyone who searches for these terms will comment on your blog if it isn’t interesting so you must have good content.  in the end you really have to decide what level of commitment you your blog and its readers you want to have.  If the answer is very little you probably should just quit blogging.

Those were the words I heard often enough at as kid when I was being cautious. I heard them from friends who tried to goad me into trouble making either with or for them. I heard them from many a male relative who simple mistook caution for timidity and didn’t really know what else manly they could say.

Now that I am older and wiser those words keep coming back to me. No, they don’t pertain to my blogging for the most part. When they do I shudder with revulsion and take action. This time though they apply to a lot of my fellow bloggers. So I say unto many of you, “Quit Being Such A Pussy!”

Most bloggers want their blog to be a source of income, a business if you will, but they won’t treat it like one. Almost every time Firefox highlights a comments section with nofollow tags, I shake my head in wonderment. These people just don’t get it. They are letting timidity or laziness get in the way of their business’s goals. The most often heard response of why they won’t turn it off is they don’t want the hassle of dealing with comment spam.

If you are getting a few hundred comments you don’t need to remove it, because some other part of your business model is working really well. That is a different story altogether, they are offering such high quality or value that they can get away with offering nothing else to their customers. Everyone else, that claims they want to make money, need to quit being pussies and take off their nofollow tags for comments.

Here is why you need to do it from a small/new business perspective. If you keep the nofollow tags and aloofly say “I don’t want to deal with comment spam,” this screams you are just lazy and don’t care about your customer. It also puts you in the arrogant beyond belief category thinking you are so important you will spend more than a few minutes cleaning up spam a day. Your blog readers are your customers. They might only come to browse, but if they comment they are leaving the store with the crap you are selling.

If they leave a botted comment that akismet picks up, they shoplifted and your auto-theft system picked them up and hauls them away no trouble for you. If they left a “Hi, this was interesting,” comment they bought the cheapest thing they could. Maybe they meant it or maybe they didn’t. Nofollow tags on those mean you took their money, scowled, and didn’t bother to even say thanks with a smile. In fact if you are moderating your comments you probably said “Fuck You!” and hit the spam button. Whether they meant it or not you have alienated them, by playing king of the sandbox and acted like a six year old bully.

Then there are the customers who really mean something to your business. These are the ones who give good relevant comments. You don’t have to remove the nofollow links the first time. You can use Nofollow Free or some other plugin and make it several comments if you like. You should of course have a page marked Nofollow-DoFollow Policy and let them know your posting policy. It is no different from a brick and mortar store posting the return policy or “we will prosecute shoplifters” sign. By removing the nofollow tags you are saying: “I thank you for making my blog better. I appreciate your comments and am willing to do a little work in the area of spam control to keep them coming. Here is your reward.”

If you want your blog to be a business, then you need to start acting like it is a business and treating readers like paying customers. Put out quality merchandise. Post your store policies. Say thank you to all of your customers. Honor the really good customers. Last, but not least, don’t be a pussy when it comes to doing a little work.

Link Note: The links on this post all go to good people who have the nofollow tags removed. They understand the value of doing this, so don’t screw with them by leaving spam.

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.

I was recently had the unfortunate experience of using a one of my local libraries computers to access one of my blogs.  Not only are they still using IE 5.X they have very limited resolution.  Despite 17″ monitors and a couple of 19″ for the really blind folks the resolution was horrible.  They were all stuck at a static 800×600 except for the large monitors for the severely visually impaired which were stuck at 640×480.  While those setting should be an option, they made for pretty horrific view of many sites I took a look at.

My challenge to theme designers is this design a theme or more importantly themes that make use of the theme switcher plugin.  I don’t have all the details worked out yet but there needs to three available sizes of the theme to choose from.  The small size should be readable full screen with 800×600 screen size with important data above the fold. The second size should cover the most prominent 1000pixel width size, but not extend past the edges of a 1024 width.  The last size should make use of wide screen monitors in either the horizontal or vertical.  Figure the resolution of 900×1440 as the widescreen standard.

I don’t know what the prizes are yet either, but if there are any sponsors who want to get in on this let me know.  The contest will begin August 1st.

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

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