Why Optimize a Personal Blog?
There are a number of different sites and services that offer ways to build a website; there are hundreds of ebooks available describing the best “online marketing” strategies; there are thousands of techniques that are supposedly guaranteed to get you traffic and generate sales.: That’s all fine and dandy, but what if you just want to create a personal blog?: A blog where you aren’t concerned with selling a product, or even creating sales pages for other people’s products?
This is the current state of my website, drewtarvin.com.: I’m not trying to sell a product or generate sales for someone else- I’m just sharing my ideas, writing articles to improve my writing skills and sharing what I’ve learned, and providing a place to find out more information about some of the other stuff I do (like stand-up).: That doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t love to optimize my site.: I love seeing new visitors come to the site, I like seeing what search terms people are clicking in Google to get here (recently someone searched for “heterokini” … why?).: In short, I want to increase the traffic to my site.: Maybe it’s narcissistic to think that what I write is worthy of being shared with family, friends, and strangers alike, but if I didn’t believe that, why even write publicly?
A Little Background
With that being said, I am creating a few other sites with the intention of generating income.: As a result, I’ve done a lot of research on ways to organically drive search engine traffic simply by making some simple changes.: What follows below is the steps I took during last week’s project – “Optimize My Blog.”: Many of the steps come from a couple of different online marketing guides.: While the guides themselves are great resources in and of themselves, they are all focused on making money.: The steps below are specific just to optimizing your blog, and they leave out anything related to generating sales or affiliates or more involved promotional techniques.
Note: Most of the steps are links to external resources that explain in greater detail how to do what I describe.
How to Optimize Your Personal WordPress Blog
NOTES:
- If you already have a WordPress blog, make sure you upgrade to the most recent version.: You can also skip directly to Part 2.
- To find even more themes (Step 4), check out:
- For Plug-ins, the definite ones to use are:
- Other good plug-ins to consider:
NOTES:
- Where John Cow mentions “Non-money” and “Money” pages, think in terms of “Non unique content” and “content” pages respectively.
- Hold off on creating the robots.txt file (Part 3) for right now.
- When linking to pages within your site, remember to “anchor” your links: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2004/04/08/anchor-text-optimization
3) Create your Sitemap.xml file
NOTES:
- Don’t turn on “Ping” yet.
4) Create your Robots.txt file
NOTES:
- In addition to the example provided on the site, add a sitemap.xml link in your robots.txt file.
- To create the file, just open a Notepad, copy the code from the site, save as “robots.txt” and upload to the root directory of your website.
5) Submit your Sitemap.xml and Robots.txt files
NOTES:
- To do this, create an account http://www.google.com/webmasters/.
- Follow the guides in Webmasters to see guides on how to submit each file.
- Make sure you “verify” the site.
6) Test Your Site
NOTES:
- Fix any errors or warnings listed in Webmasters.
- See how your site looks in different browsers – http://browsershots.org/
- Validate your site at http://validator.w3.org/checklink or http://www.xinureturns.com
7) Set Up Feedburner and All-in-One SEO
NOTES:
- Fill out the All-in-One SEO information for the posts you want to drive more traffic to.
- You can skip the steps related to Aweber (Steps 7-20).
- You can sign up for feedburner at http://www.feedburner.com.
- Once you have everything setup, make sure you add “http://ping.feedburner.com” under Update Services in “Settings -> Writing” in your WordPress blog.
What To Do Next
Once you’ve made the above changes, you’re well on your way to improving your blog for increased traffic.: The next step is to make sure you have good content and take a look at optimizing your actual articles for different keywords.: To learn more about promoting your site, or if you are interested in monetizing your site, I’ve listed the resources I’ve been using below.
A note of warning about “online marketing” sites in general.: Many sites out there will offer a free video or article talking about the next great way to make money online.: All of these sites will require an email address which they then use to try to sell you stuff through.: While you can learn a good deal for free from many of the sites, there’s a lot of garbage and spam-like email you’ll have to go through.: The links below are some of the best sites I’ve found that also don’t drown you in trying to sell you products.
- “How to Build a Business, NOT Just a Blog” – An entire ebook about optimizing your blog.: The full version of all of the John Cow articles I linked to above- definitely worth looking at for promotion strategies and if you are interested in monetizing your site.
- The 30 Day Challenge – A “challenge” held every August to try to create a website that you earn at least $1 from within 30 days.: You can check out the site any time of year and get access to the resources from the last 30 day challenge.
- Connected Internet – Various blog posts about how to optimize or improve your blog.
