Improving Blog Traffic – Report

I started this blog in February of 2006 and for the first few months my traffic was really low. It was because I was not blogging seriously.  I knew that the site was in the Google sandbox and so I was waiting for it to get out of the sandbox. I started little serious blogging only from mid-July after Google rewarded my blog with a Pagerank of 2. I then started making sincere efforts to get used to WordPress; my earlier commercial blogs were written using PluggedOut Blog Script, but it was getting outdated.

In the middle of September I tweaked this Wordpress blog little to optimize it for the search engines.

• The first change I made was to make the post permalinks search engine friendly – changing the cryptic PHP URLs to clean html URLs.
• I changed my wordpress theme and tweaked the PHP code to alter the way meta titles are assigned. 
• I also installed the Headspace plugin from Urbangiraffe.com; it helped me to have meta descriptions and keywords of my choice. That helped me to have unique title, description and keywords matching the content for each post.
• I learned little bit of XHTML and CSS to make my blog pass the validation for W3C compliance.  
• Finally I registered my blog in Technorati. I found a cool WordPress plugin called SimpleTags that made the job of tagging a whole lot easier.  I found that by tagging my post effectively they were getting a lot more attention then the untagged ones. Other bloggers started linking to my posts and as an added advantage I was getting focused, quality traffic to the site.

You can check how my Alexa figures and traffic improved in last three months. 

 

Now my next target will be to double the traffic by end of this year and also aim to achieve a pagerank of 5 by next PR update. And how I plan to achieve it? First I will make my top page as static html page; that will make it is easy for me to optimize the content for my target keywords. I will also interact more with other bloggers through forums and blogs. I will also experiment with social networks like Digg, Myspace and Reddit to get more traffic. If you have any ideas to improve blog traffic, please feel free to share in the comments.

How important is Alexa Ranking for webmasters?

Alexa is Amazon owned website that tracks a website’s traffic history, and gives a ranking based upon the number of visitors using Alexa toolbar, A9 Toolbar and other web tools. 

As blogger John Chow recently mentioned in his argument about Alexa, the main problem with Alexa is its rankings are based on users who have installed the Alexa toolbar onto their browser. If your website visitors do not have the toolbar running, they do not affect the rankings of your sites. The next big problem with Alexa is it is very easy to game. If you could get a few friends or employees to install the toolbar and have them surf your site everyday, you can break into top 100,000. Another problem with Alexa is that a large number of its toolbar users are in the online marketing, SEO or web publishingr business, giving sites which attract such audiences higher rankings.

So, what does a high Alexa rating mean to a webmaster? We all know that Alexa ranking lacks in accuracy.  Then why you should care about Alexa Rankings?

Well, there are lots of customers and advertisers who take Alexa rankings seriously. Stuart at PimpMyPageRank recently posted that if you want to sell ad space of your website through services like Text-Link-Ads, you need a better Alexa Ranking and Google PR. There are many online shoppers who are still very skeptical of where they’re going to shop on the internet. So they usually follow the others and use ratings like Alexa, Google pagerank or other traffic rankers to perceive the value of your site. 

In short, the Alexa ranking system is naturally flawed and can be easily manipulated. But the better you’re ranked in Alexa, the more business you’ll get; because the user will trust your website and feel very confident in dealing with you.  So it is definitely worth to go for a higher ranking in Alexa.

How Trackbacks can increase blog traffic?

When I started blooging I did not know what a trackback was and how to use it effectively till I come across an article by Intenet Entrepreneur Yaro Starak on blogging for beginners 

So what is a trackback? A trackback is a form of blog communication that links two or more relevant blog entries together. One blogger writes a post that references another blog’s post which is relevant to his article and fills out the trackback section. When the blogger publishes the post, the blog leaves a trackback on the other blog’s post, which usually appears in the comments area as a truncated summary with a link. 

Each blogging software system handles trackbacks differently. In Wordpress blogs all you need to do is include a link to the other blog’s post like I have done to Yaro Starak’s article in this post. The link to the post should be made to the trackback URL of the post.

Trackbacks are good because they bring traffic to your blog when you trackback other blogs. And if someone trackbacks your posts, it is good too because it means that the other blogger has read your blog and found something interesting in your blog. And depending on the blogging software, there is a good probability that they also made a direct link to your blog while trackbacking your post.  So to summarize

• Trackbacks bring targeted traffic to your site, and posibility increase your number of loyal blog readers.
• Trackbacks create high quality relevant incoming links and possibly increase your site ranking in search engines.
• Trackbacks share your ideas on the topic with the original author.
• Using Trackbacks is an easy way to let the world know about your website.

However, I am strongly against traackback spam which involves sending trackback blindly to high ranking blogs. It is better to follow trackback etiquettes and only send trackbacks to selected websites that are related to your post.