Creating a traffic jam!
One of the many reasons why a blog is a marketer’s favourite tool, is because blogs can achieve traffic fairly easy, and that’s because the open source community is more active than ever, helping the bloggers get the best from the blogging applications they are using. The automatic RSS feed creation available in WordPress is a great example. This is a huge help because it seems that search engines love RSS feeds and they index them like crazy. Ok, let’s see what you can do to put your blog’s traffic into overdrive.
As already mentioned in the plug-ins chapter, I was saying something about the Ultimate Tag Warrior tags plugin. What you will need to make sure first, is that this plugin is available. Technorati loves blogs organised by tags, and they also encourage this kind of practice. Now that you know you have got RSS feeds generated automatically by WordPress, and the tags system is implemented by the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin, we’re ready to improve the traffic a little bit more by “pinging” your blog. Here’s the trick that will help you to ping your blog on autopilot. If you login inside your WordPress admin panel, click “Options”, then “Writing”, at the bottom of that page, there is a box titled “Update Services”.
Inside that box, you need to enter just the following URL’s and that’s it:
- http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
- http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
- http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
- http://ping.myblog.jp22
- http://ping.bitacoras.com
- http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
- http://bblog.com/ping.php
You will notice that WordPress has a huge list of services available for pinging at http://codex.wordpress.org/Update_Services. However,my suggestion is to use only the above ones statedto avoid double pinging the same service and having your blog being treated as splog (SPAM blog). Once you enter those URL’s inside the writing options area, everytime you create a post, these services will be notified, and the spiders of those services will get on your blog and start indexing your new post. This is a great way to get traffic, and let everyone know that you have fresh content. A quick mention here, the Pingomatic service, will automatically send pings to other services, that’s why I insist to use only the links I specified in this list. This way, you’ll be protected from any SPAM complaints. Using these updating services, you’re sure to get your blog all the backlinks it deserves and that’s on autopilot.
The next thing you need to do is to transform your blog’s URL’s into search engine friendly links. This can be done by clicking “Options”, then “Permalinks” inside your admin panel. Then after choosing the “Custom” option, you need to enter inside the”Custom structure” field, the following text: /%postname%
That’s it! All your posts will now look like this: http://www.example.com/this_is_my_post_title_for_today_post, intead of looking like this http://www.example.com/?p=2.
Search engines will now be able to index your blog in a friendlier way, and your ranking can go a lot higher compared to using the default permalinks structure. A quick note here, you must make sure the htaccess file is writable while you update the permalinks structure, otherwise things won’t work as they should. To keep it short, this is all the info you need in order to generate traffic on your blog and adding those plugins to your back-office will surely amaze you.
Now,you have to focus on one more little thing, so keep reading the next chapter.
Join me for Part 6 of The Complete Power Blogger’s Guide
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