szehau's weblog Life, Internet, Software, Gadgets, Programming and Investments

3 simple ways to increase your website’s traffic

Found this interesting article from problogger.net and find that might help you in increase your blog's traffic:

Three simple actions that doubled my website traffic in 30 days

...

1. First, I made the most of Technorati tags. I tagged every key word in each of my posts. Initially I did this manually but them I discovered a WordPress plugin called SimpleTags that made the job a whole lot easier.

   I found that by tagging my post effectively they were getting a lot more attention then their untagged counterparts, and as an added advantage I was getting focused, quality traffic to the site!

2. I leveraged my existing website. I’ve been running my business website for a few years and that was getting modest levels of traffic that was relevant to my blog - so why not try to drive some of that to my new blog! I placed a few FeedBurner headline animator blocks on some of my most popular pages and after a day or so I noticed a significant increase in traffic for 5 minutes worth of work on my part.
3. Finally, I made effective use of trackback links to popular sites. If I commented on a post on another site I would make sure that I set up the appropriate trackback for it. The results from this are varied depending on the site and post that you are linking to but since I liked to comment and interact with the wider blogosphere anyway, it was free traffic!

...

What I think...

1. I don't like tags on my post. I feel that it will drecrease my site's traffic. When visitors see the tags, they migh click on it. I did get traffic from Technorati but I don't have any tag on my site. Instead I use the ping service. I make ping to Technorati 's ping service (http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping) whenever I write a post. You can make this automatically by putting the URL under Wordpress Admin's Options - Writing - Update Services
2. FeedBurner - yes this might help a bit. Many blogger did this. You can subscribe to FeedBurner and put the feed animator as your signature on your other site and forums
3. Agreed with him. You can have backlinks and traffic for free. But you do not spam other people website. Most people hate that.

For me, the content is the king! When you have good quality of content, search engine and traffic will come to your site automatically and slowly. Keywords are one of the key element, try target more niche keywords instead of general keywords. Please do not over mention the keywords, search engine might think you are spamming with keywords. Put those targeting keyword in page title, keywords (meta tag), title of article and first paragraph of the article. Although some search engines (e.g. Google) do not recognize keywords in meta tags but the is no reason we don't want to put it in for other search engines.

Hope this will help :)

Google Adsense is ready for Christmas!

When I login into my adesense account, I saw a news:

NEW
We've added seasonal spirit to our ad units - you now have the option of displaying themed colors and graphics in your ads during holidays and special events. Visit our What's New page for details.

Adsense is ready for Christmas! Adsense called the new format ads "themed ad units". They are the ad units that display themed colors and graphics during holidays and special events.

At the Adsense's Ad Formats page, I only see 160x600 Wide Skyscraper layout is supported. Not sure about others.

What you need to do to activate the themed ad units is go to "My Account"->"Ad Type Preference [edit]" and enable it.

Google Analytic and Urchin

Last time we heard about Google had bought Urchin. Urchin used to be a very good traffic analysis software. Now google offer it for its google account users for free. Anyone with a Google account can register it for free.