SEO Tip : Set up a sitemap for your site

One of the best ways to improve SEO is to make sure that your website gets fully indexed. You can accomplish this by setting up a sitemap that the search engines can use to quickly, and easily find all the content that should be indexed in the search results.

A sitemap is a separate HTML page that you can use to form a directory for your website. Since each page is listed as a hyperlink on the sitemap, it allows the search engines to quickly locate each of your internal pages. This is not only a great way to increase your SEO, but it also can serve as a way to help your visitor find the content that is most relevant to them.

For all you wordpress users out there, you can find a great wordpress plugin to set up your google sitemap on arnebrachhold’s page > GO GET THE PLUGIN. You can see how the plugin is being implemented on this blog by checking out my sitemap that i created with the plugin.

Here is another resource for non wordpress users on building a sitemap.

Once you have built your sitemap, be sure to go to google webmaster tools and inform google of where they can find your sitemap. If you dont have a google webmaster tools account yet, you can set one up here.

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Getting rid of Nofollow from your wordpress blog

Yesterday I was discussing with a friend of mine how frustrating it can be to post a comment on someone’s blog only to find out that the blog is defaulting to show links as rel=”nofollow”. If you are using wordpress, then this function is automatic by default, and it really penalizes your users that post great content on your sites.

This is basically something that wordpress set up as a default in order to prevent comment spamming. The reason behind this is that the links don’t get the “link juice” from nofollow links, and the sites page ranks are not effected. Of course spammers could care less about their page ranks, but most serious webmasters do (although the benefits of page rank are highly debatable).

Anyway, my friend sent me a great link today on douglaskarr’s marketing technology blog about how you can hack your wordpress code to get rid of the rel=”nofollow” default and start to give your readers the benefit that they deserve for commenting on your site.

Read the full explanation here

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Use trackbacks to give your traffic a boost

A couple of days ago I wrote a post giving you a couple good references to use if you want to start to monetize your blog, well, today let’s take a quick look at one easy way that you can actually start to pull some extra traffic into your blog…. by using trackbacks.

Using trackbacks is something that a good friend of mine recently suggested I start to try, and I must say that I have seen some extra traffic already starting to come into my blog from the few trackbacks I have given over the past week. He also has some other nice tips for anyone using wordpress as your blogging platform. Check out his site for a nice list of useful wordpress tools that will really give your blog a boost.

Coming from a background where I have been blogging for a major site, bloggingstocks, I have never really had to think about gaining traffic, I have only had to focus on actual content, so actually trying to build traffic is challenge that I look forward to learning.

Regardless, my friend suggested that I start to cite other people’s blogs that I like using trackbacks and in return could not only boost my quality of writing, but also give my site a little extra traffic. Well, obviously, as I have learned, this is a very widespread tactic that a lot of successful bloggers use, and I found a great example of another blogger writing about his experience on balkhis.com where he showed a couple instances where using trackbacks really led to some good traffic for his blog.

Basically, when you come across a good blog article that you like, be sure to cite the post, but look for the trackback link and use that as your link to the cite to get your blog post listed in their comments. In many cases wordpress is smart enough to give you the trackback even if you use the regular url of the post, but to be safe always look for the trackback link at the end of the post and use that.

It is a good technique to help build up your blogs readership, and gives you a little more authority. Hope you found this post useful, if so, be sure to take my advice and trackback to this post

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Google remains the search engine King

For me personally, there really is no choice when it comes to online searches. I just love Google and I pretty much use it exclusively, but Yahoo! is still hanging in there with a pretty sizable chunk of the search engine market.

According to ComScore, Google captured 59.2% of the overall search engine market in February. This was a slight rise from January as Google extended its control from a previous 58.5% in January.

Since the beginning of Google I have been a fan, but I really started to appreciate it a couple years ago after I started work with AOL on BloggingStocks, and most recently my own stock page, Stock Investing. I really fell in love with the Google News page and I use that website more than almost any other site online. It is definitely the best resource I know of for finding breaking news on just about any company I am looking at.

Here are how the other major search engines ranked:

Google : 59.2%
Yahoo! : 21.6%
Microsoft: 9.6%
AOL : 4.9%

It is a bit disappointing for me to see AOL so low, but then again I don’t ever use AOL for searching so I am not helping the matter either. Having said that, when it comes to finding stock prices, and market news I always head to AOL Money & Finance, which I honestly think is the best performing money page out there.

For Google… congratulations… it’s good to be king!

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