Category: MetaBlogging

Free advice on blogging and mom blogging from the original affordable personal blog consulting services to help non-professional bloggers grow their blogs.

Categories
MetaBlogging

Five Ways to Win Links—and Technorati’s Heart

Table of contents for Blogging Add-ons

About Technorati
Technorati is a blog search engine. It tracks tags and categories on blog posts, links to a blog, and your “Technorati authority.” You can use Technorati to find posts on relevant topics, track how many blogs are linking to you, or give yourself a little self esteem boost (if your ranking is high). For now at least, Technorati’s tag index pages are also appearing in Google results, so it really pays to have your posts on those pages!

Michelle at Scribbit has some great information on Technorati (Ten Technorati Tips and the Biggest Technorati Tip in the World), but with Technorati’s total redesign a couple months ago, a few things have changed. Michelle’s excellent tips on how to join Technorati, how to add tags to your post and why Technorati matters are still completely accurate. However, Technorati has changed the way they display their information, trying to encompass more than just blogs.

technorati authority and rankingOne of the changes is that they no longer list the number of blogs linking in, number of links and authority numbers separately. Your Technorati Authority is the number of different blogs that link back to yours. Your Technorati Rank is based on your authority. UPDATE (Oct 2009): Technorati now uses a scale of 1-1000 to indicate authority, rather than a direct number of blogs linking in.

Most of the growth in these areas comes naturally, albeit slowly. There are a few things you can do to improve your Technorati authority yourself (without opening up fiftybillion mini blogs to link to your real one). Now for . . .

Five Ways to Create Links & Win Technorati’s Heart
Making your own links is almost better than having other people link to you. If you have the opportunity to submit your link (like you do with the last three, and may with the others as well), you can write the text for your link. Whatever the title of your post is, your link on someone else’s blog will say that. Having a good link text can help your page rank for those words in search engines!

So, how do you make your own links on other peoples’ blogs?

  1. Commenting. This one can pay off in a number of ways:
    • Become a regular commenter who adds value to blogs in your niche.
    • Even if your link won’t count for search engines because of a “nofollow” tag, if you have a post on your blog that’s relevant to the topic of that post, share your link. Of course, don’t just drop it in a comment and leave; read the article, comment on its contents and explain how your post was related. The author of the blog might link to you or other readers of the blog might visit you and later link to you.
    • If you comment on a “Dofollow” blog (one that hasn’t linked to you in the last six months), it should count as a point on your Technorati Authority automatically. Always add value to the conversation when you comment!
  2. Create a network of blogging friends. Reach out to people who blog in your niche (hi, blogging friends!) and build relationships with them. Sometimes, they’ll start reading your blog on their own (and linking to it on their own), and sometimes, you’ll be able to ask them to link to a post that’s very entertaining or linkable, or one that you know they’d like.
  3. Participate in blog carnivals. One of my favorites is the Carnival of Family Life, created by Kailani.
  4. Participate in contests including things like Scribbit’s Write-Away Contest.
  5. Participate in projects that will give you links, such as my Group Writing Project.

Speaking of my Group Writing Project—next week is the July Group Writing Project. Spread the word—this is one we’ll all benefit from!

Get more tips of all kinds from this week’s Works-for-Me-Wednesday!

Previous in series Next in series
Categories
MetaBlogging

Safely Move Your Blog (eMoms Group Research Project)

Table of contents for Migrating your blog

I made the switch to my own domain just over 3 months ago. I’ve loved it! But moving your blog, especially if your blog is well established, can be a scary thing.

Why? Because it can break every link that your site has already earned. Those backlinks bring visitors to your site and may help your search engine rankings. And if you break them, all is lost.

However, all need not be lost. There is a safe way to move your blog or your website that (most) search engines recognize quickly.

If you’re moving from Blogger/Blogspot to self-hosted WordPress, I recommend my Ultimate Guide to Migrating from Blogger to WordPress, which includes two vital steps to preserving your backlinks. These steps are:

  1. properly implemented redirects
  2. maintaining your permalink structure

Of course, if you do #1 right, #2 may be moot. With proper redirects you can change your entire permalink structure without breaking backlinks and losing search engine love.

But first, we need to:

Evaluate Why You Want to Change
Why do you want to change your URL/domain/blog home? Some good reasons for changing your URL:

  • You don’t own your previous URL.
  • You can’t control your previous URL.
  • Your site/business has evolved into something completely different, and your domain name is completely irrelevant.
  • Your site is expanding and the blog will no longer be at its core. Perhaps moving the blog to a subdirectory is smart—but be sure to use conditional rewrite rules, or people trying to visit the new pages of your site might be redirected to nowhere.

Not as good reasons for moving your blog:

  • Your latest domain name is cooler—will you change every time you snap up a cool new domain?
  • You don’t like having the blog on the front page, but it will still be a very prominent part of your site-If you’re publishing with WordPress, you can set a static page as the “home page” and not have to move anything. This option is found under Options>Reading>Front page. Select “A static page.” The pages system in WordPress is also a fairly good content management system (CMS).
  • Your site/business has changed slightly, and the old URL is not quite as spot-on as it used to be, though it’s still pretty relevant—unless you have a far superior domain name that has significant type-in traffic, you’ll probably be better off explaining to your visitors the full scope of what you do. However, this example may be borderline.

Prepare for the Move
One of the best things to do before you move your blog/site is to generate an XML sitemap for your old site. (This assumes, of course, that you’ve already mapped out a lovely, themed site archetecture, if your site isn’t blog-only.) Hold on to that puppy, because it’s pretty important.

If you’re migrating into WordPress (and especially any part of your blog has been hosted on anything other than WordPress), it’s important to set up your permalinks before importing your old posts. I highly recommend using the Custom Permalinks option, and having your %posttitle% your permalinks.

If feasible, you might consider using a Custom Permalink structure similar to your old one. If you’re importing directly from Blogger to WordPress, for example, you might consider the permalink structure /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html to minimize redirect problems. Not absolutely necessary, but nice.

Be sure to line up some highly linkable content for the first few days and weeks after the move.

Finally, test your design and your new site to make sure it’ll be ready when you throw the switch.

Move
Whether you’re just manually copying your files over or using your blog software’s built-in import feature, you gotta get your files there somehow. Unless you’re using domain masking. That’s another story all together.

Redirection
Make sure you have proper redirects in place. If this is a permanent move, use “301 redirects” to indicate to search engines that this is permanent. Visitors and search engines will automatically be transferred to the appropriate page on your new site if you use these rewrites.

There are various ways of handling this. You can login to your domain registrar and 301 the entire domain over. You can login to your old website and modify the individual pages to include 301 notices in their code. Or you can login to the back end of your website, using Apache or Windows Servers to redirect the old URLs.

The first options here only change the domain name in the URL. If you also changed your permalink structure, be sure to implement redirects for that, too. (It’s probably best to avoid chained redirects, i.e. a visitor going to oldblog.info/superpost.html being sent to yourblog.net/superpost.html being sent to yourblog.net/duperpost.html being sent to yourblog.net/duperpost/. You can handle most of these changes in 1-2 rules rewrite rules.)

For the actual implementation of 301 redirects, I must defer to those who are much more informative than am I:

The Aftermath
Now you’ve done it. You’ve flipped the switch and your new site is live. Be sure to go back through your old site’s URLs (a sample of them, at least) to double check that redirects are going to the right place.

If they’re good, submit that old site sitemap to Yahoo and Google. This will tell them to visit your old links, whereupon they’ll learn they’re redirected to your new links. (Once they’ve come through and learned that, go ahead and replace it with your new site’s sitemap.)

Unfortunately, Technorati will be a casualty in the move. At present, they have no way to edit your blog’s URL, so your new URL shows up as a completely separate blog. (If this changes, I’ll let you know.) If your redirects are written correctly, your posts on your new blog will show up as coming from both your new blog and your old blog. Plus, any internal links within your posts will come up as incoming links to your new blog from your old blog. Confusing enough?

Do what you can to recoup your Technorati authority: e-mail people that you have connections with, asking them to update their links. Also go through Technorati’s steps to delete your old blog. Really, it’s just clutter at this point. Finally, post that really killer, linkable content to earn more links—important for search engine rankings and Technorati authority.

Bear in mind that it will take time for the correct URLs to update in search engine results, but the URLs will change. It took me about 2 weeks before my new URLs started showing up in results. I’ve also seen a page that I redirected a few weeks ago still not change its URL in the results. Aaron Wall’s article this week says he noticed Google & Yahoo change pretty quickly, but MSN/Windows Live not so much.

Don’t forget to update your other blogging add-ons: Google Analytics, FeedBurner, MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, and anywhere you may have entered your old blog as your website or homepage.

One final concern that you might have: this “sandbox” (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t worry about it). I didn’t experience it for my new site. It’s only 3 months old and I’m in the top 10 for some interesting (and some useful) terms: migrate from Blogger to WordPress, blog stickiness, mom blog advice, etc.

This doesn’t mean that your toolbar PageRank will transfer immediately; this is only updated every few months. Patience. Unless you’re using ReviewMe or Text Link Ads, it doesn’t mean much anyway.

Personally, I think that using the 301 redirects to transfer the trust you built up on your old domain to the new one is the best way to avoid the “new site” penalty. Of course, I didn’t have a ton of trust on my old site, but I did have several months’ of content. (Also, my domain wasn’t brand-new; it was “gently aged.”)

Good luck!

Part of the eMoms at Home Second Group Research Project

Previous in series
Categories
Kids/Parenting MetaBlogging

Hayden’s secret identity

I came across this on a post about personal vs. professional blogs today:

I don’t personally think I’d trust a blog about parenting if the blogger revealed the names of their children! I’d think that blogger was exploitative. But someone else might think the opposite — that blabbing about your kids to virtual strangers is the only way to earn trust and develop a connection.

From time to time, I do regret using my son’s real name on my blog. (Or at least I’ve let you all think it’s his real name, Mwahahaha!) On the other hand, I’m confused as to why this would be “exploitative” (that would be pretentious-ese for ‘exploitive’). I once called my son by his “real name” in front of a complete stranger. That’s gotta break some law, right?

On the other hand, calling my son by his name has nothing to do with earning trust and developing a connection with you guys (no offense). I pretty much do it because when I started blogging it was all about letting my family know what Hayden was up to. But really, if you think about it, isn’t “blabbing about your kids” at the heart of almost every mom blog?

In fact, if I don’t see some mention of a blogger’s children somewhere, whether real names, pseudonyms or the stupidest nicknames I’ve ever heard, I’m pretty unlikely to trust his/her parenting advice. We all remember what it was like to have no kids and all the answers.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. And do you think that this:
hayden hatted
is less exploitive than this?
hayden sunglasses

I obscured his identity…

Categories
MetaBlogging

Quick Guide to Google Analytics for Bloggers

Table of contents for Blogging Add-ons

If you’re serious about blogging, it’s important to focus on your visitors. How much do you really know about your visitors? Do you know where they come from? Why they came to your site? How long they stayed? How many pages they looked at? How many came and immediately left?

Before you say, “Oh, numbers; I can’t deal with numbers!” or “Oh, coding; I can’t deal with coding!”, let me tell you that these numbers are good to know—and very useful in growing your blog readership. And let me tell you that these numbers are easy to find, use and understand with a free web analytics package (software installed on your site that tracks what visitors do on your site)—no coding, just cut and paste.

getting started with google analyticsThere are many free web analytics packages out there. In my opinion, Google Analytics offers the most comprehensive solution. It may be a little overwhelming for someone just starting out, but it’s really not hard to find the most important numbers you need to be keeping track of. Click on the picture at right to enlarge it to see a sample of some of the important, but easy to read, reports that Google Analytics generates.

Setting Up Google Analytics
Google Analytics is easy to set up. If you’re signed up with GMail, Google Talk or Blogger (or any other Google application), you already have a Google account. (If you don’t, you can sign up for one pretty quickly.) To sign up for Google Analytics, you’ll have to enter your information (URL, location, your name, etc.) and agree to the user agreement.

Once you enter this information, Google Analytics gives you some crazy-looking tracking code that you must put on your website. It should look something like this:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src='” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-xxxxxx-x“);
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

(Note the new tracking code!)

This should go in your template somewhere in the footer. If you’re on Blogger, you can go to Layout, and click on “Add a Page Element” at the bottom of the sample page. Select HTML/JavaScript. Make sure you are not in “Rich Text” mode, then paste your tracking code here. No need for a title, just save it to your blog. Go back to Google Analytics and verify that it’s running by clicking the “Check Status” button.

Customizing the Dashboard
Once you’re collecting data from your site, Google Analytics can be even more useful to you if you customize the “dashboard” to include the most important reports to you. The dashboard is the first screen you see when you login, and you can choose which reports are displayed there so you see them first thing.

In the above screen shot (actual numbers obscured), you can see that I have the basic reports (this is all below the visitor graph displayed at the top of the dashboard), and have added a keywords report so I can see what words people are using on search engines to find my site and the Top Content by Title report so I can see at a glance which pages on my site are getting the most visitors. I recommend these two reports, since they’re easy to use and understand (not to mention their usefulness!).

The Keywords report is under Traffic Sources>Keywords. To add it to the dashboard, click the “Add to Dashboard” button under the large title “Keywords” near the top of the page. The Top Content by Title report is available under Content>Content by Title. You can add it to the dashboard in the same way. You can delete and drag-and-drop the boxes in the lower part of the dashboard to how you like it.

Also useful (but already included on the dashboard): Average time on site (are people popping in quickly or sticking around at least long enough to read something?), pages per visit (do people look at more than one page while at your site?), bounce rate (how many people leave your site after viewing only one page?) and the traffic sources pie graph. I also like to look at my top referrers (under Traffic Sources>Referring Sites) to know where my visitors are coming from.

Using the Information
Well, now what? You can see the words that people use in search engines to find your site; you can see how long they spend there; you can see how many pages they view. What can you do with this information?

First of all, you can see what pages of your site are most popular. From this, you may be able to tell what topics and style your readers like best—of, if you did something special to promote your most popular posts, you can see what you need to do again.

Secondly, you can see how many of your visitors turn around and leave. In and of itself, bounce rate isn’t necessarily bad. Unlike many websites, it’s entirely possible for visitors to your blog to visit your site and read everything new in a single visit, then navigate away (possibly to subscribe to your feed).

If your popular posts have a higher than average bounce rate, what can you do to improve that? Make sure that your most popular posts also highlight similar posts on your site. For more information on lowering your bounce rate and increasing your blog’s stickiness, download the free guide Get Your Visitors to Stick!

Another important use of your analytics is to see what sites and keywords people are using to find your site. You may never know what people are searching for when they find your site. However, if you see large trends that are central to the theme of your blog (like many people coming to your photography site for some variation of “baby portrait”), you could try to “target” this keyword more by:

  • Making it a label, tag or category on your blog
  • Making it part of the navigation, like your About or Contact page
  • Including it in the Title or Description of your blog
  • Writing a post that sums up (and links to) all your tips (if you do this, be sure to go back through the old posts and link to the new one, as well).

Finally, try not to worry too much about your blog stats. It’s so easy to become obsessed with your blog’s stats, and to tie your blog’s worth or even your own self-worth to the number of page views you generated yesterday. It’s not worth that much—really.

Download this Quick Guide to Google Analytics for Bloggers, complete with helpful pictures, as a free PDF!

Next in series
Categories
MetaBlogging

A blogiversary celebration announcement!

Today is my “blogiversary”—the anniversary of my very first post on this blog. In my first year of blogging, I’ve become a professional Internet marketing blogger. I’ve participated in memes and blog carnivals and launched a pretty successful group writing project.

In the last three months, I’ve also developed a mission for MamaBlogga, moved my blog from Blogger to WordPress on my own server and domain and grown my subscriber base to more than 100 readers.

And now, I’m ready to help you grow your blog. My big blogiversary announcement is:
MamaBlogga’s Personal Blog Consulting!

If you’re a “personal” blogger—mom blogger, craft blogger or just blog as a hobby—you deserve the same help that business bloggers and professional bloggers receive. However, business and professional blog consulting is often out of the price range of personal bloggers. Now it doesn’t have to be, with services starting at $30. My services can help you with:

  • setting up your own blog.
  • branding and customizing your design.
  • carving out your special niche.
  • appealing to visitors.
  • appealing to search engines.
  • bringing in traffic and subscribers.
  • monetizing your site.

Check out my personal blog consulting services (and pricing) and testimonials, and feel free to request personal blog consulting services!

Thank you to all my readers, and back to your regularly scheduled MamaBlogga.

Categories
MetaBlogging

Follow through on comments

Table of contents for Mom Blogging Advice

Have you noticed the “U Comment, I Follow” badges on many blogs? Even if you’re on Blogger, you can join the “Dofollow” movement.

What’s “Dofollow”? It’s a reaction to the automatic code that most blogging platforms attach to comment links (both the names of your commenters and any links they include in their comments). This code, rel=”nofollow”, was created to tell search engines that you don’t really trust this link, so they shouldn’t take this link as a “vote” for or endorsement of it.

Why should you remove “nofollow”? It’s like a nice little gift to give your commenters (and possibly an incentive for people to comment on your blog!). Here on MamaBlogga, our current policy is to remove the “nofollow” tags from your name link in the comments after you’ve made ten comments (handled via plugin). You can share the link love, too!

How to Remove Nofollow
You can remove the nofollow tag pretty easily. In fact, if you’re on WordPress, there’s an abundance of plugins that will do this for you quite painlessly (Andy Beard has an “ultimate” list of these). Other programs require a little bit of programming work, but it’s well worth it.

Moveable Type/TypePad
Moveable Type-based platforms are a little more tricky. In addition to adding a “nofollow,” they also implement a redirect. For example, instead of a link going straight to “MamaBlogga.com” it goes first to “http://www.typepad.com/t/comments?__mode=red&user_id=715412&id=72558418” (I made the numbers up) and then to “MamaBlogga.com.” Once again, this isn’t very nice as far as search engines go. For removing the nofollow and this redirect on Moveable Type, see Now is a Long Time Too. For TypePad, see ConverStations.

Blogger
For Blogger, go to Layout>Edit HTML. Check the little “Expand Widgets Templates” box. Scroll down to the comments section (it would probably be useful to paste your code into Notepad and use the Find function). Find this code: <a expr:href=’data:comment.authorUrl’ rel=’nofollow’> . Delete the “rel=’nofollow'” portion and save your layout.

Update: this will remove the nofollow from comments when viewed on a single post, but not when viewed in a popup or separate window from Blogger. For example, when you view a single post on Miscellaneous Adventures of an Aussie Mum, the “nofolllow” is removed from the comments. However, if you view the same comments in a separate page or popup window, the nofollow is still there. Those second windows are on a Blogger domain, and as far as I know, there’s nothing you can do about it. 🙁

(If you’re on the old Blogger template, this is found under Template>Edit HTML. The code to replace is <a href=”>$BlogBacklinkURL$>” rel=”nofollow”><$BlogBacklinkTitle$></a> you can’t remove nofollow from commenters .)

When making a comment on a Blogger/BlogSpot blog
Blogger will still use a similar redirect scheme to TypePad, only the link leads to something like “http://www.blogger.com/profile/16523599384736451872.” However, as a commenter, you can get around this. If the blog allows, you’ll have three options on the comments: your blogger profile, Other and Anonymous. Your blogger profile is the default, but it creates a link to your blogger profile, and not your blog. However, if you select Other, you can enter whatever name and URL that you like.

Be sure to stay tuned next week for another helpful blogging tip and an exciting MamaBlogga announcement!

Previous in series Next in series