Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto



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Who’s linking to you?

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Do you ever check to see who’s linking to you?

I think one of the great things about having a blog on your own domain and using WordPress to run it is the ability to easily find out who’s linked to you recently just by checking your dashboard.

Of course, the WordPress dashboard gets it’s recent links to your site from Technorati, so even if you are using a free blog platform you can check who’s been linking to you by creating an account and adding your site to Technorati. You can also do a Google search by putting this phrase “links: ” in front of your full site url.

I run several blogrolls and my sites are also listed on several blogrolls so I end up seeing new links each day.

Do you occasionally visit the sites that you’ve found linking to you? I do. I don’t always leave a message, but I visit quite a few of them. I’m also thankful for all of the links I seem to be receiving too.





Social network sites take a chunk of my time each day

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Did you know that I spend perhaps as much as an hour a day going through all my “friend” invites and other messages that come in from social networks like Mybloglog, Blogcatalog, Facebook, and Bumpzee?

I haven’t actually kept track of how many friend requests come in each day or how long it really does take so my “hour” is an estimate, but I think it’s fairly accurate. When someone makes a friend request or joins my neighborhood I visit the social network site and then I often visit the person who’s just made me a “friend”‘s blog as well. So, yeah, it can take some time.

How much of your time do you think social networking takes you each day or week?

Thoof is a great way to gain visitors to your site and measure your posts popularity

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Have you joined Thoof.com yet? It’s a site where you can go to read news articles, view photographs and videos and or posts from websites and blogs.

Members may submit their stories to Thoof when they’ve created a post that they’d like to share with the world.

Submitting your stories is actually a great way to drive traffic to your site. I know a number of bloggers who have been using Thoof regularly since they discovered it, and they’ve said that they get new visitors every day. There’s even a Thoofit button that you can drag to your bookmarks that makes it even easier to submit a story or article that interests you from any site on the web. You can find that button on the submit it page.

What’s more, when you visit Thoof and search for a particular type of story, photo or video the site will remember the choices that you’ve made so that the next time that you visit stories, photos and videos of a similar nature will be on the front page when you sign in. In this way Thoof can become your own personalized news site.

Thoof has recently added a new feature to their site. When you submit a story you’ll get a ThoofRank badge that you can add to your site. This badge will measure your stories popularity on Thoof.

I think this is a great idea. Other than looking at our sites stats or how many comments we get on a particular post we have very few ways to measure the popularity of the various posts we create. Now, when you submit a story to Thoof and use the ThoofRank badge you’ll have another way to measure how interesting your story is to others.

I think I’m going to start using Thoof more often. I mean other bloggers have said they are getting traffic to their site from the stories they’ve submitted and they’ve also said they like the stories they are reading on the site. It’s a great way to keep up with other bloggers.

I’ll start by submitting this story. It’ll also be a great way to test out the new ThoofRank badge. I wonder just how popular this story might be?

So who’s going to join me at Thoof?

The importance of search engine optimization

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I read a lot of forums, blogs and websites and one thing that strikes me time and time again is how little most people know about natural search engine optimization. The real shocker for me is that it’s not always those who are new to being a website owner that seem to not know what SEO is, but people who have been blogging or maintaining sites for years.

I believe that search engine optimization begins with the purchase of your domain name. If you are writing a site about bikes it’s important to have the word bike in your domain name. The search engines will like that and might give your site a higher standing on search engine results. After all the whole point of optimizing our sites for search engines is so that people doing searches can find us easily.

If your your site comes up on page 10 of a Google search results page it’s unlikely that you’ll have many visitors. However if you consistently pick appropriate keywords for your sites articles, article titles, page titles, site titles and even domain names you’ll have a good chance that your site will be found on the first page of search engine results.

My sites tend to do well in search engine rankings because I try to use keywords in my articles that describe the topic I’m writing about and I also try to use a descriptive title for my posts.

I shake my head when I visit a blog and see a great article about a specific topic yet the title is some off the wall line like “Yaba daba do what a day!”.

If you really aren’t sure how to optimize your site for search engines you might want to hire a search engine optimization company to help you. They can take a look at your site and do a consultation. Perhaps they’ll give you a price quote that contains a list of what they’d do to optimize your site.

Many search engine optimization services such as the one I’ve linked to above, submitawebsite.com, have information about SEO techniques that you can begin to use on your own to better your standings on search engines.

As I said earlier a SEO company will also offer a number of SEO services that you might want to use to promote your site just as text link ads, optimizing your site for search engine placement, pay per click services and management and many other services that could help your site reach number one on in the search engine results.

If you don’t have time to optimize your site for search engines on your own do look into the services of a SEO company. It’s worth it if you want to boost your traffic.

Monetize using Kontera and keep kontera out of your paid posts

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As I mentioned in one of my recent posts Kontera was interested in partnering with me. They contacted me a month and a half ago greatly interested in helping me monetize my sites using their program of content links.

I’d been interested in the program for a while, but considering that I write articles for companies I didn’t want to have Kontera bubble ads in those posts. In fact in many cases I’d be breaking my agreement or the Terms of Service with the companies that had provided the opportunity to write those articles. I also didn’t really want to have any ads in my recent posts because I’m not sure how my regular readers would react to that. I know that some people wouldn’t care, but others would just hate it.

Luckily, while I was taking my time deciding whether I’d use the Kontera ads on my sites my blogging friend Lucia from Big Bucks Blogger was listening to my concerns and the concerns of others, and she got busy creating two fantastic plugins that those who do pa1d p0sts and want to use Kontera will not be able to live without! Well if they are wordpress bloggers anyway.

Lucia has created the Kontera Control plugin which lets you control exactly where and when Kontera ads show up in your wordpress blog. I haven’t added Kontera to this site yet, but when I do ads will show up in comments after two days, and in new posts after 3 days. They will not show up in permanently compensated posts at all, and posts that only require a post to be permanent and unchanged for a specific period of time, most often 30 days, will possibly have kontera ads after 60 days. Complete instructions on how to set up the Kontera Control plugin have also been written by Lucia.

Now, to exclude Kontera from certain posts you need to put all of them in a particular category. You can name the category anything you want.

Here comes Lucia again with another fantastic plugin.

She’s created the Hide Sponsored Categories plugin. She made the plugin for those that do compensated postings, but anyone could use it to hide any category. Simply activated it and check off which categories you don’t want to show up in your tags, category list, and or archives. If you are like me you don’t just choose one category for a post so no post will every be completely hidden.

It took me a while to set it all up because I had to rework some categories, but I’m now using both of Lucia’s plugins on all of the blogs except the photoblog.

I’ve been using the plugins for about a week and a half and so far the plugins are working quite well.

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