Archive for November, 2008

Check this out, it’s the Google Time machine and it shows results from a ten year old archive of its index, some interesting stuff in here.

This just shows how the index has grown in the last ten years, since the birth of Google the index and archive has grown exponentially…when you’ve settled into your niche type in your keyword or keyphrase and just take a look at the shape of the competition ten years ago.  This is a great guide for determining the growth of your niche over a ten year period, of course some of these resulting websites no longer exist, but there’s another fascinating exercise!

Enjoy!

7) Blog Networks

Once you have established your blog and it has been indexed by the Bots, it is time for you to start building more blogs and external references which point back in to your main site.  So if you have established your main blog on an independently hosted Wordpress platform you will also create a blog in a similar theme on Blogger, Wordpress, Squidoo, Hubpages, Tumblr etc etc, each of these will have an RSS feed installed from your main blog platform which will result in inbound links from your ’sub-blogs’.

It is essential that any posts that are created on your main site are indexed by Google before you decide to copy them or re-write them to your ’sub-blogs’, this will alert duplicate content filters and Google will ultimately ignore the posts.

Try to write naturally on your sub-blogs but focus your main theme writing to the main blog, which will be seen as an authority in Googles eyes.  Use a service like Comment Kahuna to find other blogs in your niche and write constructive and meaningful comments on other blogs, this will result in relative inbound links to your main blog and possibly pass on Page Rank if no-no-follow is established.

How many blogs to create in your network depends upon the niche in which you are operating, it is important to be as random as possible in your structure and posting so that Google doesn’t sniff out your little plot for domination…Google loves natural!

6) Write For Your Audience

When you finally get to grips with google analytics you will quickly discover the power of connecting with your audience.  By knowing what the visitors are really looking for (analyse the long tail keywords in analytics) we can target our keywords more specifically, we can root out the long tail phrases and build our blogs and links to build blog reader loyalty.

By securing this loyalty we can then build a relationship and become an authority on our subject matter, which will result in more links to our pages and increased rankings within the search engines and Web 2.0 portals = MORE TRAFFIC.

Keeping in touch with news worthy articles in your niche is an essential part of your role as a blogger, becoming an authority in your niche, writing compelling material for increased reference.  By researching news worthy issues within your subject matter you will remain at the forefront of reference for your peers and at the same time you will begin to build keywords within your blog that are fresh and upto date.

5) Analytics

Use Google analytics to track your visitors and monitor their behaviour when they arrive.  Google Analytics is an extremely powerful resource and it’s free to anyone who has a Google account.  By pasting a tracking code into your html or php you will very quickly see the entry points and exit points and everything in between.

The power of tracking is always completley under estimated and under used, possibly one of the most powerful elements of Google Analytics is the facility to discover which keywords your visitors are typing into which search engine in order to find your site.  Once they are there you can see how long they stay and this is a representation they have tagged as Bounce Rate.  The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that enter your site and for whatever reason they leave almost immediatley, the bounce is a metric that is important in Google determining if your pages are relevant to the search terms and keywords used to enter your site.

Geographical information is also available through Google Analytics so to recap the value in tracking is knowing who is coming to your website, from where they came using which search engine, via which keyword, which page did they land on, how long dod they stay and which page did they exit from!  Powerful stuff eh!  This allows us to change the direction of our writing to better suit the metrics of our visitors.

4) Generate Traffic

In order to make money from your blog you will need visitors to pass by every once in a while and then yhese may buy from you once in a while!  There are many strategies to driving traffic to your blog and it is a combination of the total that will provide the very best results for increasing visitors.

Social Bookmarking is a popular ‘promotional’ method used by almsot every professional blogger, this process allows you to get the word out about yours and other peoples articles and points of interest.  The facility to bookmark on a central service as opposed to on your pc offers a pathway for people to follow links of interest and occasionally allows some Page Rank to pass over to your page.

Article Marketing is another popular form of driving traffic to your posts,  By writing (not copying) articles that are compelling and offer ’slipperiness’ to your subject, you can seduce your prospects to click on your article links and visit your blog.  Very few (if any) article directories offer any Page Rank opportunities.  The most popular article drievtory by far is Ezine Articles, I refer to these sites as content clusters and the sheer volume of unique content and semantically structured writing makes the site extremely Google friendly, so your article sits within an authority framework with high PR.

Link Building is another form of traffic funnelling and in the process gaining a certain amount of PR on occassion.  Submitting your site to Directories results in one way links to your domain which offers more opportunities for being discovered for search terms and phrases.

There are many many different ways to generate traffic to your blogs, there are also many methods that have been in favour and have subsequently fallen out of favour!  Just write about your niche and then see what happens with a little social bookmarking.

RSS (really simple syndication) is a facility whereby each post that you write is pinged (like a digital transmitter speaking to digital receivers) to all of the Search Engines and RSS directories, resulting in frsh indexing from GoogleBot and the other lesser known and cared about SE Spiders.