11# How to write post headlines

The headline of your post is important for two reasons

1) Good headline draws readers attention at the moment they are deciding whether to read it
2) Again, Google picks the headline keywords for indexing. So it's important to have keywords that reflect the content of the post and also get ranked high in the search queries.

Here is a good post telling how to write headlines:

http://www.copyblogger.com/magnetic-headlines/

They say it makes difference. I will try it, starting from this post :)

10# Adding images to your posts

Images are good to have in your posts. They grab attention, they are indexed by Google..However, it's hard to find free quality images on the web. Check these sites:

http://freelargephotos.com/
http://www.sxc.hu/

All you have to do is mention the source of the image in your posts.

9# Submit blog to Live Search


To submit website on Microsoft Live Search
  • Go to submit page
  • Type in the captcha letters and numbers
  • Type in your site URL
  • Hit "Submit URL", and you're done !

You can do it here

8# Submit blog to Alexa



Just one more site submit, this time to I'll submit my site to Alexa index, here:

http://www.alexa.com/site/help/webmasters

At the bottom of page that opens, just type in your blog URL and hit "Crawl My Site" button.

Alexa bot will visit your blog soon..


By this far I have used the Blogger default font for my posts. I have seen in many blogs where the authors use different fonts, more suitable for web:
Here is a small comparation of available fonts:

  • This was written with Comic Sans MS
  • This was written with Default Font
  • This was written with Courier New
  • This was written with Tahoma
  • This was written with Trebuchet
  • This was written with Verdana

I find Verdana-font to be most usable for blogging, so for now on I'll use it
for my post.

6# Submit blog to Yahoo


Submit your site

This is my second step turning my blog more visible, I'm gonna submit my site to Yahoo for indexing. The Yahoo Site Submit option is easy and free. All you have to do is enter the URL of the site you'd like to submit to be included in the Yahoo Search index. Must have a free Yahoo ID in order to do this (registration required).

5# Submit blog to Google

My blog is not indexed yet. You can check this for your blogs and websites here.

It's time to submit this blog to google for indexing. For simple submit click here. After this I can expect google crawler to visit and index this blog..

Now, more interesting and complex way of submitting your blog can be done here (you must have Google login for this). It's called Google Webmaster Tools, after you have proved that you are the owner of the blog, you can diagnosticate and analyze your blog data from Google point of view. well worth of your time.

To proove that you are owner of blogger blog, use Meta tag method, add given Meta tag to your template and validate.
For wordpress log, use HTML method, create a page post with given name and validade.

Nice site about SEO for bloggers, check it here. Must read, has many good tips for beginners like me.

4# Using Meta Tags

For those who don’t know, a meta tag is an HTML tag that is located in the
HEAD section of a web page. Unlike other HTML tags, meta tags
do not appear anywhere on the page itself, so visitors never see
them. Different meta tags serve different purposes, but they are
generally used to provide additional information about the page.

for complete description of meta tag, check this site

Some of them are useful, especially when communicating with search engine spiders.

So how can I use meta tags in my posts ? Here is a good article about it: How To Use HTML Meta Tags from searchenginewatch.com.

I have choosed to use these tags in my SEO experience:

  1. META Description
  2. META Keywords
  3. TITLE
So lets check them one by one:
  • META Description
Can be used to provide short description about your page/post. Visible to some search engine spider/robots. Example:
<meta content='SEO Progress, SEO and' name='description'/>
  • META Keywords
Can be used to provide information about you page/post for search engine spiders. The bad thing is that this tag is normally ignored by most of them. So don't count too much on it, but it doesn't hurt to try. Not more that 25 words. Example:

<meta content='SEO Blog Blogger post traffic' name='keywords'/>
  • TITLE tag
It's not a meta tag but it's useful in an different way. The text that you put inside of the TITLE tags ends up in your browsers title bar, and if a page with TITLE tag gets bookmarked (hoping for that !), the content of it will be used for bookmark name.

Now, the good news is that blogspot already does this autmatically for your every post. That's why I already had this in place on my third post.

You can create the description and keywords tags easily with Meta-tag generator: http://www.orblogs.com/get_meta.asp

Just go ahead and define your description and keywords and click "get tags" button. From the you can follow the instructions on how to change your blogger or wordpress template so that those tags will be included on every post.

To edit template on Blogger, login in, choose Dashboard/Layout/Edit HTML.

How to verity if your tags are working, two quick methods:

1) Go to your blog as visitor, when page is loaded click View/Page
Source (Ctrl+G) on Firefox browser menu or on Internet Explorer View/Source on browser menu. This opens an HTML view of your page. You should be able to find easily the TITLE and description and keywords tags in the resulting HTML code, look for TITLE tag first, metatags are under it..


2) Verify your blog on Metatag Analyzer, you'll get quite comperensive report: http://www.submitexpress.com/analyzer/


3# Added visitor counter

I just felt that I need to show how many visitors my blog has, so I went and googled some counters for blogger:


I chose the free version of SiteMeter, it had the best look, and it comes with some analytical data too. So I had some extra with my counter, here it is:


Site Meter

This does not necessarily increase my traffic, but its a nice to have..
For today, that's it. Lets see how many hits this blog can get.

2# Added Google Analytics

Google Analytics and AdSense. These are two of the reasons why I have decided to create my blog in blogger.com (which is owned by Google).
AdSense is already activated, so now I'll "turn on" Google Analytics for my site, these are the benefits: (taken from the analytics site)

Make profit-generating improvements to your advertising and website.
  • Fast Implementation
  • Keyword and Campaign Comparison
  • Custom Dashboards
  • AdWords Integration
  • Internal Site Search
  • Benchmarking
  • Trend and Date Slider
  • Ecommerce Tracking
  • Funnel Visualization
  • Site Overlay
  • Email reports
  • GeoTargeting
Pretty complete, huh ? And it's free !
Here is what you have to do to have Google Analytics in your site/blog:

Create and Google Account then Sign in to Google Analytics, this all can be done here

At the end of the process you will have to insert a script in your page template , right before </body> tag. In blogger this can be done in "Layout/Edit HTML". Quite easy..

1# First post, blog created

This is the very first post here, the basic idea is to describe in every post what has changed in this blog since the last post. The "changes" of course are all my attempts to increase my blogs traffic. These changes are documented in details so that everyone easily can put them in pratice. I'll keep the posts in numbered in sequencial order so it will be easy to follow up later.

So, this is what we have now (nothing much):
- Blogging pro template, check it here (removed the amazon deal of the day ad - one ad is enought for my blog)
- Edited the template HTML so that the footer will show recent posts and comments, instructions for that can be found here
- Added Ad-Sense (of course, every weblog should have this). By the way, to convert ad-sense script into format that blogger.com understands I've used this nice tool to edit my script:

Blogger ad code converter

Use this, othervise you will have to edit it manually, Copy & Paste form Google AdSense won't work..



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