Blog Traffic

Jul 10, 2012

Alexa ranking – infographic showing how to improve it

Alexa ranking. An important measure for potential advertisers

How to improve your Alexa rankingIf you are like me you probably want to improve your Alexa ranking as it’s a good way of showing you, potential advertisers and guest bloggers how your blog compares to the competition. Plus you get a warm glow when you finally break through the 100,000 mark!

With Alexa you have to be ‘in it to win it’ so you will need to register your site with them. This means that not every website is included in their ranking. There are currently only 30 million sites listed! So it’s not a totally accurate tool, but it’s a very good guide so I encourage you to register your site and get the badges. Check out the widget down on the bottom of the right hand sidebar. It helps with your search engine optimisation (SEO) and they get over 6 million visitors a month.

Apart from giving you useful analytics for your site Alexa also provides tools to improve your SEO and you can pay a premium to get blog or website optimisation. It helps to get a few people to review your site as that impacts on your ranking. Persuading some of your raving fans shouldn’t be that difficult although they do have to sign up to Alexa which may be a potential objection. Explain to them of the benefits of doing it for their site and you should be OK.

Here is a handy infographic to show you how to improve your Alexa ranking. I have followed this advice with my clients’ blogs and they have all improved their ranking within a few weeks dramatically. Plus one of them is edging closer to the magic 100,000 mark.

I’ll keep you updated about the progress for www.workfromhomewisdom.com. We are looking to reach that Alexa ranking target before the end of the year.


Like this infographic? Visit MichelleShaeffer.com to learn how to build visibility, voice, and community online.

By Andy Britnell Blog Optimisation, Blog Traffic 39 Comments Tags: , , , , ,

Apr 1, 2011

How to Install Google Feedburner on your Blog – Simples!

How to install Google Google Feedburner on your blogNow that you are aware of the benefits of Google Feedburner you’ll want to know how to install it on your blog. As someone who looks for the easiest way to get something done I suggest you check out one of my favourite Blogs from WordPress Beginner which covers the more technical side of WordPress with user friendly posts and tutorials on every aspect of the WordPress platform.

It includes a step by step guide to setting up Google Feedburner which I can’t improve on. It also has many comments with questions and answers that might be useful for you.

Although this is the process for WordPress, where you need to install the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin, you can integrate Feedburner into pretty much every blogging platform or website with the code provided for your set-up.

I encourage you all to add this to your site and get the warm feeling of knowing that people are watching you, clicking on your feed and reading your content. It allows you to fine-tune your content as you can see where your visitor’s interests lie.

You can also check out new content and see if it strikes a chord. I think that this is one of the great things about blogging – you can test the market quickly, easily and at little cost. It is also satisfying to watch your subscribers grow over time.

So make this an action now and let me know how it helps you improve your ability to deliver great content and attract raving fans.

By Andy Britnell Blog Optimisation, Blog Traffic, WordPress 12 Comments Tags: , , ,

Mar 29, 2011

10 Benefits of Firing up your Blog with Feedburner

10 Benefits of Google FeedburnerNo doubt you would have heard of RSS (Really Simple Syndication), which is a way for interested visitors to get your new content sent to them rather than having to come to your site. If you want to make your RSS feed even more effective then using Google’s free Feedburner service is essential to your traffic building strategy.

What are the benefits of Feedburner?

WIth Google Feedburner you can:

1. ‘Burn’ multiple feeds to your blog for your main content, comments, categories, tags and authors depending how you want to serve your visitors

2. Get a true estimate of readership through number of subscribers and statistics – initially this can be confusing as it looks at visitors per day to your feed. However you will be able to see how many people are clicking on feed links, which stories they are reading and how many subscribers you have

3. Make your feed funky by adding your logo to the feed and on emails sent to email subscribers

4. Add social media and bookmarking links to your feed making it easier for people to share your content

5. Include advertisements to your feed if you want to monetise it using Google Adsense.

5. Feedburner re-hosts your feed so if you get lots of traffic your server doesn’t take the hit. Someone could inadvertently check your feed every second which would crucify your site!

6. It’s an all in one plugin which is simple to use and allows people to auto-subscribe in the reader of their choice. So rather than use 3 or 4 plugins which will slow down your site, Feedburner multi-tasks for you.

7. Maintain a permanent RSS feed address. Possibly one of the best benefits as it allows you to change blogging platforms or your RSS feed URL without disrupting your readers interface through the Feedburner URL

8. Make sure your content is readable as Feedburner is browser and reader friendly – whatever browser or reader your visitors use Feedburner can handle it.

9. Publicise your blog using the many tools available

10. Set up Feedburner to automatically ping Technorati and other online directories, search engines etc. which will need to know when you’ve posted something new so that it will show up in search engines

To sum up Feedburner allows you to build both your visibility and credibility online by keeping in touch with your target audience on a regular basis. Remember that the more time they spend reading your material the more likely they are to use your services or buy your product.

So now you know why Feedburner is useful you can subscribe to See a Man About a Blog by email (see top right sidebar) and get my next post on how to add it to your site sent direct to your inbox!

By Andy Britnell Blog Traffic, RSS for Blogging 15 Comments Tags: , , , , , , ,

Google Search Robots – Friend or Foe?

Mar 1, 2011

Google Search Robots – Friend or Foe?

Google search algorithm and content farmsGoogle have recently changed their search algorithm, PageRank, which helps them to rank pages on the internet. Their search robots are sent out with specific criteria to search for and if you hit the right buttons you’ll get ranked highly. If you don’t, you’re toast.

This time they are targeting the content farm sites and sites without original content – that means sites which strip out your quality content and post it on their site so they have lots of content with no effort. They now have a content farm filter (crap catcher might be a better name!) which detects duplication of material.

(By the way, you might want to set up Google Alerts to track your name and main keywords as, when content farms strip images from your site, they often link back to the image on your server. That means that they use your bandwidth to serve the image to their readers. Not only do they steal your content but they also syphon the juice from your site).

It has always annoyed me that, for many search terms I use for my sites, my best keywords will bring up garbage sites at the top of the list. Not because they are worth reading but because they are fooling the search programme and getting ranked by cheating. Judy’s site about working from home has been particularly difficult to rank. The key word ‘work from home’ is very competitive. However she is now at page 3 on Google so some trash has been removed. There’s still some dross left behind though!

I am pleased to see Google doing something about it and many people have found that their content-rich blog is starting to get more visits and gain more visibility and credibility amongst the global surfing community.

So is this really a win-win-win situation?

A win for bloggers because their content will be seen by more poeple interested in what they are saying, a win for surfers because they are going to find funky stuff that was buried under a mound of steaming sites, and a win for Google in that its searches will become more relevant and people will use it more.

Unfortunately there is a downside as hundreds of legitimate sites have been tripped up by the new criteria, some losing half their traffic overnight. This Guardian article cites research done by Sistrix which shows that the British Medical Journal and Technorati are amongst 300 sites that have suffered due to the new search algorithm.

Cult of Mac are a hardworking team who write original content and aggregate news about Apple and Mac stuff. They have been hit by content farm filtering quite badly and have given examples of others in their post Cult of Mac Has Been Hit By Google’s War On Content Farms.

So Google have some tweaking to do to make it a win for some people. But at least they are attempting to reach their vision of serving legitimate, relevant and awesome content to the internet surfing community.

By Andy Britnell Blog Traffic 12 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Jan 28, 2011

If you want Google to love you .. love Google

If you want Google to love you ... Love GoogleIf you have ever taken a close look at your web statistics, the hits you get from the Google search engine far outweigh the ones you get from the likes of Yahoo, Bing, AOL, Ask and Search. You could say they have cornered the market and are now the engine of choice for browsing the web.

If most of the search engine traffic comes from Google it makes sense to be friends with them so your blog or website gets more visibility. Let’s take a look at what you need to do to cuddle up to this giant and get it to notice you.

How do I ‘love’ Google?

Good point, well made. The more use you make of Google the more it is going to recognise and find your website or blog online. Using their website tools means that you have more links on Google real estate which gives you a lift up in the listings. You might not get a massive surge of traffic immediately but you are fertilising the soil so that your traffic is more likely to grow.

So what do I do?

If you haven’t got a Google account set one up now. Complete your Google profile and add the links to your website, blog and social media profiles (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, Myspace etc – you have got online profiles on some or all of these, haven’t you?)

The more you populate cyberspace with your unique name (business and/or personal) the more presence you have when someone searches for it via Google. If you search for Andy Britnell I pretty much dominate the first 6 pages (It’s a shame that there’s a racing driver with the same name which breaks up the perfect situation of having every entry in the first 6 pages but I am working on that).

Top Tip: If you have a common name, why not make it unique by adding an initial or second name. It might seem a bit weird at first but people will probably remember John Matt Smith and find you more easily that way. Plain John Smith will get lost in the crowd – sorry John, no offence.

That is a start and some of you will probably now be thinking about which other social media (SM) sites you can add a profile to with a link to your blog or website. If you hit the share button on this or the featured posts above you will find a list of most of the SM sites you could be listed on.

I’ll be doing another post on how you can give and receive even more love from Google by using their website tools.

Thanks to Marcin Wichary for the image

By Andy Britnell Blog Traffic, Social Media 11 Comments Tags: , , , ,