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Showing posts with label blog. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blog. Show all posts

Friday, 8 October 2010

Stephen Fry's increase traffic tip!

Ok so this isn't really one of Stephen Fry's tips on how to increase traffic to your blog, but it is relevant to him, and worked substantially well for me. Although this isn't an easy method of increasing traffic and bringing more people to your site, it is an extremely successful one!



First things first; GET TWITTER. Although a lot of people have signed up to Twitter for the pointless reason of just adding their friends, who they already have on Facebook, Twitter is actually an amazing way to stalk, I mean follow* celebrities in their daily life. Me? Personally I use Twitter to follow members of bands I love. And through it, I've found out about secret gigs or cheaper merch etc. However, it's nice just on a general level to see members of huge bands as just regular human beings. For example, Frank Carter, lead vocalist of post-hardcore band Gallows, is always Tweeting about his Kill to Death ratio on Xbox Live. It's just nice to see famous people, as well....just people.
'How is this post relevant to ME' you might be asking. 'I don't care about celebrities and their lives.' Well that's fair enough, but the long and short of it is, if you can make friends with a celebrity, the likelihood is they will Tweet your blog.Now I'm not saying that Stephen Fry (I use him as an example because he has the most followers on Twitter out of most celebrities) is going to Retweet each and everyone of your blogs. Far from it. Aim a little smaller.Now if you have been following me for while, you'll recall my post about Frank Turner (You can read it here: http://studentaroundtheworld.blogspot.com/2010/09/perfect-travel-music.html)As one of my favourite musicians ever, (Seriously I strongly urge you to check him out) I of course have him on Twitter and over the last couple of months have been Retweeting (passing in for you non Twitter users) his messages etc.Now, after Tweeting about my blog post that included a short Frank Turner review, I was shocked, yet amazed find that he had passed on my blog to his 13 000+ followers!




And has he has THIS many people following him:



My blog received a huge amount of traffic. As Frank Turner's tweets are linked to his website, I was getting several sources of traffic, and my views rose sharply!
So guys, if you're using twitter, START FOLLOWING CELEBRITIES! Be friendly with them. Banter with them. And if they're a decent bloke like Mr Turner is, then who knows, maybe one day they'll retweet your blog to!


Oh, and Justin Bieber and Britney Spears aren't going to Retweet your blogs, so aim a littttttle smaller than the big celebs!



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Thursday, 7 October 2010

How to increase traffic to your blog with Google searches

OK guys, so although this post may not be directly related to travelling, in this post I'm going to tell you one way, that successfully worked for me, to increase traffic to your blog.

Now, this certainly isn't going to bring you 5000 million viewers over night, but if done correctly, you will see a steady rise in your traffic.

Ok I'm going to try and make this as simple to follow as possible as it can be quite confusing.



Now, I know a lot of you are having trouble with making your blog Google searchable. The computer and coding literate amongst have tried added Meta tags to your blog in order to increase traffic. Although I have tried this myself, I haven't noticed much on an increase and have been told that Google no longer uses Meta tags to make it searchable.


Step one. The first thing you need to do is to visit http://www.google.co.uk/addurl/ and add your blog page URL into the URL box. Underneath this box there is a comment box. Now here I just wrote a simple description of what my blog was about. Keep it short and sweet. No need for more than one sentence.
After filling in the Captcha click submit and you're blog will have been added to a list for Google to crawl.


1) Next up we need to open http://www.google.com/webmasters/ 



2) Then sign in with your Google account.

3) Next you need to click the ADD A SITE... button which looks like this:

4) A small box will appear - Enter your URL here.

5) After clicking Continue,we have to verify that we are the owner of this blog.

6) Here there will be 4 options in which we can choose how we want to verify our site. However, the only option we are interested in is the META TAG. Now we should see a code which looks a little something like this:


Picture of code


<meta name="verify-v1" content="z6MLWEMxLvMFcoVNvGPKOMvAn1oJBKem+eTEpZ1F/DU=">

                                                                                                Actual code ^


7) Now after we have copied this code (DOUBLE CHECK YOU HAVE THE ENTIRE CODE COPIED) we need to go to the Dashboard of our Blogger, then select Design > Edit HTML.

Now, we nee to look for the <head> tag. This is only a few lines down in the coding so shouldn't be too difficult to find. The easiest way to find it is to bring up the Search function, with Ctrl + f and type <head>.

The Meta code needs to be pasted IMMEDIATELY AFTER the <head> tag.

Once you've pasted this code, simply Save the Template and go back to the Webmasters Account, and click Verify to Complete the verification process.

8) If you've done everything right, you'll see that your site is now verified. HOWEVER, KEEP READING as we're not done just yet.

SIDE NOTE - DON'T REMOVE THE META CODE AFTER VERIFICATION. IT MAY BE USED BY GOOGLE AT A LATER DATE.

9) Now you should see a list of verified sites (Most likely just one, your blog) on your Webmaster tools homepage.



10) Click on your site, and you'll be taken to a dashboard of that site.


11) From here you need to click Site configuration, then Sitemaps.

12) On this page you need to click Submit a Sitemap and it will ask you to enter the sitemap of your blog. As you can probably see, the first part of your blog is already there and you only need to enter the second bit;



feeds/posts/default?max-results=500


Overal all, it should look something like this


http://www.yourblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?max-results=500

13) So Submit your sitemap there and within the next 24 hous, Google will start to index the contents of your blog!


Now, give it several hours (I gave it 24 hours) and return to your Webmaster tools. On your dashboard, on the left hand side there should be a Your Site on the Web button. Expand this and you can see data gathered from Google searches! For example, Google will crawl your site and show you the keywords found on your blog!

If you've found this helpful and used it guys, simply Tweet this The button is located below the post title.


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