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.

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.

Something is up at Technorati. For more than a month now I have been having problems with them properly indexing one of my blogs. Despite the fact that it was being updated either manually or automatically with daily digest posts, http://www.bradsotherblog.com was simply not getting its ping through to Technorati. This just isn’t me, either.

The first suggestion they made was to manually ping your blog at http://www.technorati.com/ping this works for all of my blogs except The Other Blog. After trying that and a ticket submitted with no answer I finally complained on the post board and the blog was quickly taken care of. They apparently want to take care of people who open their mouths in public a lot faster than they do those who wait patiently for returned emails. Well that one ping they did worked exactly once, the blog updated and jumped from an authority of 8 to 14 when all was said and done.

I checked back a week later and nothing since that day had been indexed. I sent another ticket and posted on the bulletin board the same day. Three days afterwards I received a reply to the first email and was told the blog had been indexed, what they didn’t say was it was done shortly after I made the problem known on the bulletin board. I have since had to make more than half a dozen posts in order to get the blog regularly indexed. Who ever is in charge of doing that does it pretty speedily and should be rewarded for it.

I have received several answers as to why this is happening from the board admin, and none of them are very likely. First I wasn’t given an answer. The second time I was told there was just a delay in indexing. The next time they blamed it on the number of anchor links some of my posts contain. They have blamed it on the number of tags. They have always fixed it an done an auto update but they refuse to address the key issue many bloggers are having. Neither the automatic ping services nor the manual ping at Technorati are working for many of us.

As I said this isn’t just my problem either. If you surf over to the Technorati discussion board you will find quite a few people who have gone a couple of days without being tracked to those who have gone weeks. One blogger reports his blog hadn’t been indexed for more than a year. I have no idea how often he posts, but Technorati simply can’t say his problem was a simple delay in indexing.

If you are a serious blogger with a Technorati account don’t just assume it has been working for you, go check it out. I know some of you are asking what the big deal is. First off if you are displaying the Technorati logo on your blog, you are advertising them in exchange for a service which includes indexing and providing search traffic. If they aren’t providing that, then they are operating on a fraudulent principal and should be paying you for the advertising. Secondly they are getting paid advertising because of the service they provide, I think the advertisers that pay them should be made aware that they aren’t getting everything they are paying for. I know I certainly would if I were paying big bucks to advertise on a site making claims of tracking a hundred million plus blogs, but only updating three quarters of their claim. The fact is they are a corporation and all corporations private or public need to be held accountable to proper standards.

I won’t debate whether they have the right or not to deny tracking of individual blogs, but the fact is they have an obligation to tell people that their blogs will not be tracked. They don’t even have to provide a reason, they just have to be honest about doing it. Of course none of us know if this is a softwarer glitch, which they have never admitted to, but they need to come out and say something one way or another. Failure to do or say something is the best way for them to lose their credibility. I can live with it being some sort of technical problem, we have all experienced those, but the fact is something needs to be done and done soon.

I was researching this topic for you when I ran across this excellent article and decided just to give you the whole thing.  it has some stuyff that I am going to go put in practice on my other blogs right now so have a good day.

How to Get Inbound Links from Government and University Sites   by Dr. Deepak Dutta

The inbound link is the holy grail of web traffic. Getting inbound links from government and university sites is a testament to the quality of your site.

You accumulate inbound links not only to increase traffic, but also to establish your site for providing high value to visitors. However, getting inbound links by link exchange or buying text links is not going to get you anywhere. You need to abandon those archaic ideas and jump forward with an inbound link strategy that provides high value authoritative links.

To obtain high value authoritative links, your site must provide high values to its visitors. Original authoritative articles and tools to solve everyday problems are a few ways to provide a lasting value to web surfers. Before you embark on your link-building mission, create something valuable.

Links from the government sites have very high value. If your site enables citizenry to interact directly with the government, it is an excellent candidate for a link back from the government site.

Sites that provide community level services, for example location of Social Security Offices in the USA with interactive maps, will also have high potential for outbound links from government sites.

Other types of sites that do well are sites that provide information about service performance, for example, a nursing home comparison site; sites that cross inter-governmental boundaries; and sites that allow transactions with the government, for example, filing taxes.

If your site is a good fit for outbound links from government sites, start with usa.gov site. It is a central information hub for everything government. On the bottom of the page, you will see About Us and Contact Us links. Read their linking policy by clicking on the About Us before you contact them.

You don’t have to confine yourself to the US government sites only. Explore the possibilities of getting links from foreign government sites also. But keep in mind that your site should provide some values to citizenry of those countries and people wanting to do with them.

For example, most government embassy sites don’t display their embassy addresses in interactive maps. If your site pulls their addresses displayed in simple texts in a web page and place those addresses on Google maps for interactivity, you can contact them to put a link back to your site. Explain to them that your site adds additional value to their visitors by providing richer user experience.

College and university sites provide a good opportunity to develop some authoritative inbound links. The key here is to provide services geared towards students. You may also be able to get links if a faculty member is interested in your contents.

Don’t start spamming university forums, guest books, etc. People may attack your site and bring it down, report to your web host company or domain registrar. You will lose your credibility and reputation. Try to establish relationship by helping others. Let them know that you know your topics and are willing to share with them.

If your site provides some valuable services to students, approach the appropriate university authority for linking. For example, if you have a tool that compares student loans from different sources and suggests the good ones depending on a student’s financial situation, university loan office will be willing to link to your site as a resource.

If you have a blog with original and regularly updated contents that talk about impact of the technology on the society, you may approach a faculty in sociology to link to your site from his or her home page located in the university server.

Government and university sites provide good opportunities for developing inbound links if your website has a match with their requirements. The key to that is quality contents and useful web tools. Once you meet their requirements, it is worth pursuing these entities for spreading your website links to them.

About the Author

Deepak has provided free online marketing tools like free classifieds and free ads sites for more than a decade, followed by article marketing and social media link building tools.

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.

Just when I thought my LJ Blog was just a cross post repository for my other blogs so my friends could keep in touch with what I am doing along comes the a surprising number of Google hits to The Other Blog and I find that they are being directed from my LJ which had this nice hand slot of second position in an Idol Results search. The post wasn’t an hour old and who knows by the number of hits, 60 in a matter of minutes, I might have been the top slot for a bit. As means of drawing traffic to your blog, cross posting and staying in touch with you friends in these communities can certainly be to your benefit.

One of the best tools I have found of recent to help improve our blogging is the ScribeFire extension for the Firefox browser. It allows you to automatically post to your blog while surfing. It works for self-hosted WordPress, WordPress.com TypePad.com LiveJournal.com, and a few others. My hopes were dashed that it wouldn’t recognize MySpace, but that was just too much to really hope for. MySpace wants you on site or not at all, and frankly that is just too damned big of time waste for me right now. It is a good resource to try and tap, but at this point I don’t have the time to repost everything to MySpace on top of trying to write content, upgrading my themes, editing my novel, etc. The next great thing about ScribeFire is it will allow me to switch between blog accounts easily something I can’t do when I use to blog the things I Digg. It will also allow you to post in draft mode so you can use all the fancy Meta tools I am sure I will get around to preaching on later this week.

The next great Firefox blogging tool is a custom hack of the main CSS file ( usercontent.css ) which decides how things will look while browsing. Search Engine Genie shows you how to highlight any rel=nofollow links. Why is this important? As a blogger if you comment or pay for your link to be hosted somewhere that that has a rel=nofollow added to the link search engines will ignore you and not follow the link back to your site. There are many reasons to be both a do follow and a no follow blogger, but those are for another lesson. To get your name and site indexed, I would suggest posting relevant comments on any of the blogs I have listed in my D-List

If you get the coding done right it should look something like this
Google Search

You can mass around with it by using your own coded file with this link <a href=”http://www.google.com” rel=”nofollow”>Google Search</a>