Archive for the ‘SEO Tips’ Category
Top three must have plugins for wordpress
Plugins for wordpress can take an ordinary blog and spruce it up. Make it interesting to the reader and with the right plugins for wordpress, can make your life as a blogger easier. Here is a great reference list to thirty great plugins for wordpress.
Out of this list, here are the top three that I have used in my own experience that have really made a difference in my blogging experience.
Google Sitemap Generator: The must have of SEO fixes is a google sitemap generator as it will create the information the search engine requires to easily crawl though your pages and index your content. This plugin for wordpress formats your google sitemap properly and will ensure that the search engine is aware that your blog has been updated recently.
Here is where you can find out more about the google sitemap generator:
Sociable: Social Media Optimization is a strong natural way to build traffic to your blog. The key to making the most of SMO traffic is make it easy on your reader to tag your post and add it to whatever social media network they belong to. The plugin for wordpress Socialable does just that for you. It provides a quick obvious button for readers to click and add your post.
Here is where you can find out more about the Socialable plugin
WordPress database backup: The biggest fear with anything online or electronic is losing the data. Without a printed backup which no one does with blogging, if lost it is gone forever. For many this could cost thousands and thousands of dollars. Using a plugin for wordpress to backup your blog posts can save you a possible nightmare situation.
Here is the link to the wordpress database backup plugin.
Any plugins you use for your wordpress blog not mentioned?
![[del.icio.us]](http://thebloggingcenter.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/delicious.png)
![[Digg]](http://thebloggingcenter.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/digg.png)
![[Feed Me Links]](http://thebloggingcenter.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/feedmelinks.png)
![[Google]](http://thebloggingcenter.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/google.png)
![[Kaboodle]](http://thebloggingcenter.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/kaboodle.png)
![[LinkedIn]](http://thebloggingcenter.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/linkedin.png)
![[Reddit]](http://thebloggingcenter.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/reddit.png)
![[Squidoo]](http://thebloggingcenter.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/squidoo.png)
![[StumbleUpon]](http://thebloggingcenter.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/stumbleupon.png)
![[Technorati]](http://thebloggingcenter.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/technorati.png)
![[Twitter]](http://thebloggingcenter.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/twitter.png)
![[Windows Live]](http://thebloggingcenter.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/windowslive.png)
![[Yahoo!]](http://thebloggingcenter.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/yahoo.png)
![[Email]](http://thebloggingcenter.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/email.png)
Get blog traffic series: Make the most of your RSS feeds
SEO fixes can help you get blog traffic by ranking your site in the top of search engine results but once a reader finds your blog, it is up to you to keep them. Return traffic and repeat visitors are the key to a successful blog. Look at the top blogs out there and you will find in their comments that many of the same names post each day. What this means is that to get blog traffic you need to get new readers AND keep the ones who have already found you.So how do you get blog traffic by keeping the reader who has found you? The answer is to make the most of your RSS feeds. Here is a short and long term solution to get blog traffic with RSS Feeds.
Short term solution is to be sure to you are offering both the email and feed version of your RSS feed. Not only do you need to be sure you are offering both email and feed version, the user should not have to work to find where to sign up. Your RSS feed should be very clear and obvious if you want to get blog traffic by having them sign up for it. RSS feeds are the best way to ensure once someone has found you that they will keep up with your writing. Feedburner is the best option as it is reliable and easy to manage subscriptions.
Long term solution to get blog traffic with your RSS feed is to ensure you have submitted your blog to RSS directories. There are many aggregate sites out there and repositories that track all of the blogs and their feeds. Submit your feed to all of them and eventually other sites will pick up your feeds. More readers of your feed will translate to you getting blog traffic. Here is a good list of RSS directories you should submit your feed to.
Get Blog Traffic Series: Increase blog traffic by writing good content
If you want to get blog traffic you need to have content. More importantly, you need to write good quality content for your blogs if you want to see an increase to your blog traffic.What defines good blog content? How does it relate to an increase in blog traffic? Well, good content requires two things smart use of the right keywords and has to add value to your readers. If you can make a balance between these two items in all of your blog posts you will see an increase to blog traffic as search engines will rank your posts higher and more importantly readers will come back after they found you to read new articles in the future.
Here are the solutions for the day to increase blog traffic:
Short term solution to increase blog traffic is write quality content. This will be said over and over again but content is king. Quality content will get blog traffic faster then simply writing keyword clogged articles. Sure you need to work your keywords into your article but do it as subtle as possible. Your articles should be giving value to your reader and if it does you will see an increase to blog traffic as the reader will return each day in the future. If you do not add value to your content all of the SEO fixes in the world will not matter.
Long term solution for SEO fixes to increase blog traffic is to write articles considering how people search for the information. Don’t waste your title of the blog post with a generic statement. Form a title that you would image someone searching on such as how to get blog traffic or ways to increase blog traffic. You want to form your keywords in search engine friendly phrases – this is also called long tail keywords. Look at your keywords you are about to write posts for and try to add long tail keywords to them to make them fit exactly what someone will search for.
How to get blog traffic by exploiting free blog traffic avenues
As discussed this week is how to get blog traffic week here which will focus on providing a short term solution and a long term SEO fix for providing ways to get blog traffic. Many people chose to pay money for traffic by signing up for google adwords program which allows you to select keywords which would advertise your site if used and then set a monetary budget for what you will pay if someone clicks on a link for those keywords. This is effective for some marketing campaigns when you are looking to get blog traffic but really, nothing beats getting free blog traffic.
Free blog traffic involves you being active as a marketer. You can not be lazy, you can not sit around waiting for people to find your site and get blog traffic. You need to get out there and socialize, be active. Here are two techniques you can use to get free blog traffic for the short term and long term SEO fix route.
Short term solution to get free blog traffic is to join a blog carnival. Blog carnivals are free to join and requires a few minutes of your time. What happens is that you view other people’s blogs and earn credits. Those credits translate to other people viewing your blog. If your content is good this will convert to comments and more readers. A few blog carnivals you can consider to get free blog traffic is Blog Explosion, Blog Carnival and Blog Soldiers.
Long term solution to get free blog traffic is to write press releases for your blog. There are many free press release avenues available to you. Press releases can do two things for you. They get you free backlinks to your blog and they can be picked up by RSS aggregators which will help build free blog traffic to your site. Here are a few free press release places to sign up at: Free Press Release, PRLog and 1888 Press Release.
This week will be how to get blog traffic series
When you create a blog you want to get blog traffic to come and read your wonderful and witty words. How do you get this to happen? Well, there are many steps you can take to get blog traffic some are short term solutions which result in you working hard to get blog traffic but if you stop, so does the traffic. The other is a longer term solutions to promote your site to get blog traffic by taking SEO fixes.
This week I am going to post about a short term solution and a long term solution you can implement to help get blog traffic. It is a good idea to mix both techniques and not focus too much on any one thing. You do not want to be working on getting traffic for the same blog forever. This is where long term strategies come into play. As soon as you have rolled out the right long term plan to get blog traffic then you can move on to the next blog or next project or next whatever it is you want to spend your time on.
Today’s short term solution to get blog traffic: Update your signature to be a link to your blog. I know this is not ground breaking but time and again I see people who have blogs that do not refer to them in their email signature or forum signatures. Also, be sure to use the right anchor text in your email signatures and forum signatures.
Today’s long term solution to get blog traffic: Be sure you are using the post name in your URL as part of your permalink settings. Look at the URL of your blog posts. Does it have p=123 or some other number in there instead of the title of your blog post? This is a bad move. The URL being built with the title is a great and simple SEO fix for your blog that can help result in an increase in search engine traffic.
Three quick fixes to Improve search engine optimization for your blog
Search engine optimization is not an overnight action where you do one thing and the next day you are ranked on the first page. SEO takes a long time of constantly working on your blog both within building content but also outside building links. However, here are three quick fixes to improve search engine optimization for your blog that you can do right now that will help your chances.
1. Improve search engine optimization by having organized and well structured code. Spiders like clean code and while you may be using a freeware theme for your blog you are now the owner of it and need to ensure that it is bug free. Run your website through a validator to see if there are any quick fixes you feel comfortable taking care of on your blog. The cleaner your code, the more spiders like you, the higher your rank on search engines becomes. Run your blog through this validator and check over the errors.
2. Creating a site map for your blog will help spiders crawl your content and ensure your blog pages are indexed properly. The result will be an improved search engine rank. Site maps are simply a listing of all of the pages and posts on your site in one big file. Spiders follow links to your content to index it. A site map ensures all of your content can be accessed by at least one link. If you don’t have a sitemap, a good place to start is by joining Google’s Webmaster Tools. Here you can create one and google webmaster tools will tell you where to upload it to.
3. Create and/or update your robots.txt file to ensure it represents your blog accurately. The robots.txt file should be stored at the top level of your domain and if you are specifically allowing or disallowing files for inclusion you should update based on your new content. If you are new to the idea of a robots.txt file and have not created one, here is how google suggests you create one and a tutorial to follow.
These three simple things you can do at any time and should plan to do so every quarter or so to ensure your blog is efficient and it will improve your search engine optimization greatly.
