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Optimize Your Personal Wordpress Blog

By drew tarvin ⋅ September 9, 2008 ⋅ 2 comments

Why Optimize a Personal Blog?

There are a number of different sites and services that offer ways to build a website; there are hundreds of ebooks available describing the best “online marketing” strategies; there are thousands of techniques that are supposedly guaranteed to get you traffic and generate sales.  That’s all fine and dandy, but what if you just want to create a personal blog?  A blog where you aren’t concerned with selling a product, or even creating sales pages for other people’s products?

This is the current state of my website, drewtarvin.com.  I’m not trying to sell a product or generate sales for someone else- I’m just sharing my ideas, writing articles to improve my writing skills and sharing what I’ve learned, and providing a place to find out more information about some of the other stuff I do (like stand-up).  That doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t love to optimize my site.  I love seeing new visitors come to the site, I like seeing what search terms people are clicking in Google to get here (recently someone searched for “heterokini” … why?).  In short, I want to increase the traffic to my site.  Maybe it’s narcissistic to think that what I write is worthy of being shared with family, friends, and strangers alike, but if I didn’t believe that, why even write publicly?

A Little Background

With that being said, I am creating a few other sites with the intention of generating income.  As a result, I’ve done a lot of research on ways to organically drive search engine traffic simply by making some simple changes.  What follows below is the steps I took during last week’s project – “Optimize My Blog.”  Many of the steps come from a couple of different online marketing guides.  While the guides themselves are great resources in and of themselves, they are all focused on making money.  The steps below are specific just to optimizing your blog, and they leave out anything related to generating sales or affiliates or more involved promotional techniques.

Note: Most of the steps are links to external resources that explain in greater detail how to do what I describe.

How to Optimize Your Personal Wordpress Blog

1) Set Up Your Wordpress Blog

NOTES:

2) Tweak the Navigation

NOTES:

  • Where John Cow mentions “Non-money” and “Money” pages, think in terms of “Non unique content” and “content” pages respectively.
  • Hold off on creating the robots.txt file (Part 3) for right now.
  • When linking to pages within your site, remember to “anchor” your links: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2004/04/08/anchor-text-optimization

3) Create your Sitemap.xml file

NOTES:

  • Don’t turn on “Ping” yet.

4) Create your Robots.txt file

NOTES:

  • In addition to the example provided on the site, add a sitemap.xml link in your robots.txt file.
  • To create the file, just open a Notepad, copy the code from the site, save as “robots.txt” and upload to the root directory of your website.

5) Submit your Sitemap.xml and Robots.txt files

NOTES:

  • To do this, create an account http://www.google.com/webmasters/.
  • Follow the guides in Webmasters to see guides on how to submit each file.
  • Make sure you “verify” the site.

6) Test Your Site

NOTES:

7) Set Up Feedburner and All-in-One SEO

NOTES:

  • Fill out the All-in-One SEO information for the posts you want to drive more traffic to.
  • You can skip the steps related to Aweber (Steps 7-20).
  • You can sign up for feedburner at http://www.feedburner.com.
  • Once you have everything setup, make sure you add “http://ping.feedburner.com” under Update Services in “Settings -> Writing” in your Wordpress blog.

What To Do Next

Once you’ve made the above changes, you’re well on your way to improving your blog for increased traffic.  The next step is to make sure you have good content and take a look at optimizing your actual articles for different keywords.  To learn more about promoting your site, or if you are interested in monetizing your site, I’ve listed the resources I’ve been using below.

A note of warning about “online marketing” sites in general.  Many sites out there will offer a free video or article talking about the next great way to make money online.  All of these sites will require an email address which they then use to try to sell you stuff through.  While you can learn a good deal for free from many of the sites, there’s a lot of garbage and spam-like email you’ll have to go through.  The links below are some of the best sites I’ve found that also don’t drown you in trying to sell you products.

  • “How to Build a Business, NOT Just a Blog” – An entire ebook about optimizing your blog.  The full version of all of the John Cow articles I linked to above- definitely worth looking at for promotion strategies and if you are interested in monetizing your site.
  • The 30 Day Challenge – A “challenge” held every August to try to create a website that you earn at least $1 from within 30 days.  You can check out the site any time of year and get access to the resources from the last 30 day challenge.
  • Connected Internet – Various blog posts about how to optimize or improve your blog.
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Project #36 – Optimize My Blog (Review)

By drew tarvin ⋅ September 6, 2008 ⋅ 2 comments

It’s been a busy week optimizing my wordpress blog for both regular readers and people coming to the site for the first time. The most apparent change is the design. While it wasn’t my intent to completely redesign the site, it just kind of happened as I continued to make improvements to things on the back-end.

I’ve also made some changes to the navigation. Jokes are now separated in their own “Joke of the Day” section.  This should help reduce some of the clutter having new jokes every day creates. Similarly, Projects are now separated into Project Tasks and Project Reviews. The most recent project posts will also appear under “Current Project” and “Last Week’s Project” based on if they are a task or a review.  The categories over on the right have also been updated and a few more have been added – articles, cartoons, pictures, and videos.

Going forward there will be a much greater focus on articles (after all, I am claiming to be a writer). Many of the articles will be inspired by my weekly projects, such as last week’s “Stop Hitting Snooze and Wake Up Early.” While it won’t be a requirement that I write a new article every week, that will certainly be the goal.

As mentioned above, there were also a number of changes behind the scenes. Things such as using Wordpress to manage my entire site (not just the blog) and actually creating a robots.txt file. These changes will be further explained in an upcoming article describing how you can optimize your personal wordpress blog.

That pretty much covers the changes and the work I accomplished this week (incidentally most of it happened at six o’clock in the morning). Hopefully you enjoy the improved site; let me know what you think of the changes in the comments.

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Project #36 – Optimize My Blog (Task)

By drew tarvin ⋅ August 31, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

Ever since I started back in 2007, my blog has really been meant for me.  The original 365 Day Challenge was meant to force me to write everyday.  This year’s Joke a Day Challenge and 53 Weeks of Drewy Goodness are also ways for me to commit to progressing towards some goal.

During this time, I’ve never really tried to publicize my site to attract more visitors, nor has the site and it’s content been written with the audience in mind.  I’ve taken small steps here and there, but at this point it’s mostly just friends and family that read the blog.  But, based on my increased presence in various Google rankings, as well as my desire to become more involved with writing, I’ve decided to make a focused effort to optimize my blog and increase traffic to my site.

This week’s goal is to take some steps towards that optimization.  It is also to re-organize the way my blog is laid out to be geared more towards new and frequent visitors, rather than just a catch-all of everything I have to say.

Success = Wordpress Optimization and new organization of Blog Content.

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Project #8 – Website Reinvention (Review)

By drew tarvin ⋅ February 23, 2008 ⋅ 2 comments

Unless you’re reading this through an RSS reader, you’ve already noticed that the blog itself has gone through a bit of a makeover.  If you haven’t already, head on over to the main page- I’ve finally added content, completed the links, and made it “purty.”

Feel free to leave feedback on how I can make it better.  It works best at 1024×768 or better, and it appears to be working for Firefox and Internet Explorer.  Future minor updates to the site (not within the scope of this project) will include:

  • More videos.
  • More pictures.
  • Interactive games based on my stand-up.
  • Electronic copies of my resumes.
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