Are you receiving the amount of Google referred traffic you'd like? The answer is probably that you're not. When talking with clients, the subject of Google traffic and SEO is almost always raised. For new blogs (or web sites), garnering search engine traffic is understandably difficult. What can you do to improve your blog's SEO (Search Engine Optimization)? Below are some of the issues and activities that I have found most helpful. In retrospect, I'm posting them here as I find I often bring these up in (almost) daily discussions. Before we get to the good stuff, it's important to touch on some of the issues which negatively impact your SEO and resulting traffic. The following are issues I encounter almost all of the time (and mostly because the blog owner does not realize the following issues). Negative SEO Issues: Make sure you retain the services of a professional web hosting provider. If the server hosting your account is often unavailable, that means Googlebot also cannot access it. The more often this occurs, the less traffic will be referred to you (because your blog will not be as prominent in search results, as it could be). Don't participate in "keyword stuffing" when writing your ...

I received a twitter question from @marika2motivate that asked (you can follow me on twitter @BloggerSavvy): "Is wordpress better? and if it is can you explain why? Trying to feel my way around the blogging world!" To answer, I think the best approach is to look at the pros and cons of self hosted (stand alone) versus site hosted (community) blogs. Personally I am biased towards a self hosted Wordpress platform as it allows for greater control and customization. Again, having said this, the real issue is how you are going to drive your content, do you require full control or are you going to hand off your blog's control to a third party? As most blogging platforms offer more or less similar tools; for those interested in the nitty gritty (comparing platforms) WeblogMatrix has a nice tool to help you compare actual platforms. Another nice link that Google returned was "Blog software comparison chart". In my (humble) opinion self hosted blogs are the best (and most professional) way to go. However, without further delay, here's my take on the pros and cons... Self Hosted Blogs The good: Using open source software (such as Wordpress) results in an affordable installation (it's free). There's no payment for the ...

Do you monitor your web statistics regularly? Have you noticed that some of your posts have a higher bounce rate than others? Do you want to encourage your visitors to read more of your posts? If so, the following tools and suggestions will help. Before we review some of the things we can do, let's define what a "bounce rate" actually is, and see which tools can help us determine  our bounce rates. "Bounce rate" has two definitions. According to Google (analytics) it refers to the act of a visitor entering your blog (or web site) and leaving within the first five seconds. More commonly, we understand it to mean the percentage (or number) of visits to your blog, where the visitor enters and exits the same page without visiting any other pages on your blog. Evidently we want visitors to remain on our blogs. The top two tools I use to compare and find bounce rates are: AWStats. AWStats is robust and is a standard statistics gathering system on most web servers. Google Analytics. Is an online analytics service operated by Google. Both of the above tools will help you determine your bounce rates. Personally I favour Google Analytics for ease. Additionally, I'd recommend reading ...

I spoke with a new blog owner yesterday, who almost lost a fair bit of content as the result of an intrusion. Additionally, he was locked out of his own site (which prompted the phone call). Fortunately I was able to help him avoid any further damage to his content as we were able to stop the unauthorized access in it's tracks. But what could he have done to avoid or mitigate any loss? What steps can we as bloggers take to help safeguard our valuable content? In my opinion, one issue is to maintain your own server. Do not host your blog on a shared server hosting account. Shared hosting accounts mean just that - other people (whom you don't know) also have accounts on the same server, it can increase the likelihood of an incident. To give you one simple example, I was using a shared server for a quick small web site development project about six years ago. The hosting company had some issues with the server and left it in an unprotected state (they were working on it at the time). I remember logging in (via FTP) that afternoon and had full access to the files of ...

When I launched my first blog (a Linux based niche blog) at Ubuntu Linux Help, initially I did not have much content. As content built and traffic grew, I ended up writing some posts that went viral. Three of them were: Top 100 of the Best (Useful) OpenSource Applications. Why I Quit Windows and Switched to Linux. Why is Linux Faster than Windows? I enjoyed the traffic those posts provided (and still provide to this day) as they helped my blog grow. I think they were popular because they provided a valuable resource as well as elicited fair bit of discussion, as some of the posts and resulting comments were very outspoken and opinionated. One of the above posts (Why I Quit Windows and Switched to Linux) was a very personal story describing some of my career experiences and how they effected my professional life and thoughts. Imagine my surprise when I found another blog with the identical content on it. So much so, that the author who scraped my content claimed it as his own! At that time I had more than enough technical knowledge to initiate actions that would catch-out scrapers, but I’d not yet fully experienced some of the nitty-gritty administrative ...