Welcome to blogging
Article by: Roy Werner Karlsen
Welcome to the 3rd part of the Become A Blogger Mini Course. Inside today's lesson, I'll talk about all the nitty gritty details of optimizing your blog for floods of new traffic.
But before we get into that, let's have a quick recap to look at all the things we covered so far.
Inside the first lesson, I explained in more detail exactly what a blog is.
Inside the second lesson, I talked about a very important subject - that of selecting the right topic for your blog.
Picking the wrong topic could be detrimental to your success as a blogger, and that's why I made sure I gave you enough information to figure it all out.
If you have not selected a topic for your blog yet, don't stress about it. Just be patient and keep doing research and drilling down on the kind of activities that you are truly passionate about.
The next step was to get your blog up and running, and I suggested you use the complimentary videos on www.becomeablogger.com to help you set up your very first blog.
So, let's assume for now that you've been able to select a topic that you want to blog about, and you've even been able to install your very own blog.
So what's next after that?
Before you can start getting traction for your blog you'll need to optimize it.
Unfortunately most installations of WordPress does not come optimized, but lucky for you, there are a few neat little tricks you can implement to get this all sorted out.
There are two areas of your blog that you need to optimize for...
- Search engines - And people
Let's tackle the first one for now...
-------------------------------------------------- How To Optimize Your Blog For Search Engines --------------------------------------------------There are a number of things you can do for optimizing your blog for search engines. The first and most basic thing you need to do, is to install all the right plugins for your blog.
The essential plugins you'll need to install are:
*** The SEO Title Tag plugin ***
Depending on your theme, this is likely the most crucial plugin you will need to install into your WordPress blog. Some themes (like the Thesis theme for example) takes care of the same kind of issues that this plugin takes care of.
But in most cases, the SEO Title Tag plugin will be "gold" for your blog in the weeks, months and years to come.
Basically, what it does is turn all the titles of your posts into search engine friendly titles.
In other words, using this plugin, search engines will be able to easily pick up on the keywords you use inside the titles of your blog, and therefore increase your chances of getting ranked on the top pages for search engines like Google.com.
You can get the SEO Title Tag plugin here:
http://www.netconcepts.com/seo-title-tag-plugin/
*** The Subscribe To Comments Plugin ***
Now this is a really neat little plugin. It's easy to install, and at first sight does not look like much. But boy! Can it help you get more repeat traffic to your site!
The Subscribe To Comments Plugin creates a little check box inside the comments area for each of your blog posts which allows people to subscribe to all the comments that are being made on that particular post.
Then, every time a new comment is made, the person who subscribed to the comments, receives an instant message telling them that a new comment has been made. They can then click on the link provided inside their email that will take them straight back to your blog.
How cool is that!? Simple, but powerful.
You can get the Subscribe To Comments plugin here:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/subscribe-to-comments/
*** The WWSGD Plugin ***
This plugin is great for increasing your number of RSS subscribers (watch videos #9 and #10 on www.becomeablogger.com to get an understanding of what RSS is).
WWSGD is short for "What Would Seth Godin Do". And it's named after Seth Godin, a well known marketing genius.
The WWSGD plugin creates a small subscribe box at the top of each of your posts each time a new visitor comes to you blog. You can modify the text inside the box, but basically, it lets you ask someone who's new to your blog to subscribe to your RSS feed.
If they then click on the link supplied, they will immediately get directed to the page for subscribing using your RSS feed.
So, whenever you post a new blog post, all your RSS feed subscribers will get notified, and therefore drive traffic straight back to your blog.
You can get the WWSGD plugin here:
http://richardkmiller.com/wordpress-plugin-what-would-seth-godin-do
*** The Akismet Plugin ***
This is an essential plugin if you don't like blog comment spam. Yes, you read that correctly, blogs are also plagued by spam. But instead of email spam, the spam comes in the form of comments on your blog.
But luckily the Akismet plugin takes care of all your comment spam issues. There's not much more to it. You just install the plugin, and it then takes care of the rest for you.
You can create your WordPress API Key needed for the Akismet plugin here:
http://en.wordpress.com/api-keys/
*** The Sociable Plugin ***
If you are into the whole social media thing (and you should be if you're reading this!), you'll really want to install the Sociable plugin.
Once installed, it creates a list of icons linked to all the popular social bookmarking sites so that your readers can easily bookmark your blog posts in case they want to come back to your site and find specific information easily again.
Once again, installing this plugin will help you drive traffic back to your site. So it's definitely a keeper!
You can get the Sociable plugin here:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sociable/
*** The XML Sitemap Generator Plugin ***
The XML Sitemap Generator plugin is one of the more intense plugins to install.
But it's really worth it.
It creates a special kind of sitemap (called an XML sitemap) of your whole blog that is easily readable by search engines like Google.com and Yahoo.com. And this in turn makes it easier for these search engines to list all your blog pages and posts inside their search results.
So, this is a definite MUST HAVE plugin!
You can get the XML Sitemap Generator plugin here:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/
That pretty much wraps it up for optimizing your blog for search engines, using plugins.
There are a number of other things you can also do to help optimize your whole blog for search engines. But I'll leave that for another lesson.
For now, the above plugins will be a great foundation to build on and will help you set up your blog correctly for search engines right from the start.
Now, let's look at the next main point...
-------------------------------------------------- How To optimize Your Blog For People --------------------------------------------------Next I'll show you two really neat plugins that you can install to make the user experience of your blog so much more pleasurable.
The first plugin is called...
*** The Threaded Comments Plugin ***
What this plugin does, is create a threaded style commenting structure for the comments that are made on your blog posts.
In other words, this plugin allows you to not only reply to a post on your blog, but also to reply to a reply to a post... and on and on, creating what's called a threaded, or nested comment collection.
For an example of this, make sure you visit the Become A Blogger blog at www.becomeablogger.com/blog. You can get the Threaded Comments plugin here:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-thread-comment/
The next plugin is another keeper...
*** The Contact Form 7 Plugin ***
This plugin helps you create awesome looking contact forms on your blog.
By installing the Contact Form 7 plugin, it means that you don't have to list your email on your site anywhere, hence reducing the chance that spam trawlers will pick up your email address and send you a bunch of spam messages.
The best part about this plugin, is that it makes it extremely easy for your blog visitors to get in touch with you directly, without knowing what your email address is.
And besides, the implementation of this plugin is just beautiful, and it really looks the part. I've just installed this plugin on a new blog in case you want to check it out for yourself. You can see it in action here:
http://freemagiclive.com/contact/
You can get the Contact Form 7 plugin here:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7/
-------------------------------------------------- What Else Can You Do To Optimize Your Blog For People? --------------------------------------------------There are a number of other things you can do to help optimize the experience of your visitors. One major such thing is to install a decent theme for your blog.
By using a great looking theme, not only will your blog look more professional, but you will also stand out from the crowd of other people who just use no-cost themes.
Another problem with the no-cost themes is that their coding is often very poor, and could affect your search engine rankings in a bad way.
The one we recommend at Become A Blogger is The Affiliate Theme, and you can grab a copy here:
http://www.affiliatetheme.net/625-4-3-1.html
We're already had lot's of really great reviews from this theme, so make sure you get yourself a copy.
...and that brings us to the end of today's lesson.
I hope you've found it useful and that you'll be able to install all the above mentioned plugins successfully onto your blog.
Don't forget that if you get stuck at all, get a professional technical person to help you out.
If you don't know where to look for such people, try a site like www.elance.com or ask in forums.
Once you've installed all the right plugins and your new theme for your blog, you are ready to move onto the next major stage of your blog - content creation.
Inside the next lesson, I'll reveal some magical content creation tips that will let you crank out content like a professional author on steroids. So, if you're stuck for ideas on creating content, this part will just blow you away!
This next lesson will help you create the back bone of a long term very successful blog.
But I can't reveal too much more than that for now. You'll just have to wait and see inside the next part of this mini course!
Until then...
Talk soon!
Roy Werner Karlsen
Become A Blogger
Part 3 of 7
Ingen kommentarer:
Legg inn en kommentar