Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Internet Beacon’s blog. My name is Josh. We’re an internet marketing firm located in Finksburg, MD. We specialize in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO means that we work with you and your website to increase its popularity online with search engines like Google and Yahoo. For more information, please check out our SEO Answers page and our previous blog post on SEO. This week, I’d like to talk about increasing traffic to your blog.
Putting Down Roots
A blog is essentially a journal that’s posted online for everyone to see. Blogs are often a part of a community of other bloggers. To this end, informal communities tend to spring up around blogs that associate with a common theme or idea. Use this to your advantage. Leave intelligent comments on blogs with similar topics to your own. However, exercise caution here. You don’t want to go around spamming other people with links to your site. You will quickly become ignored. Rather, simply join into the online conversation. Most sites will offer you a chance to leave a name and website, so use that as your point of contact.
Stick to the Plan
Anyone who has ever worked on a project will tell you that one of the most dangerous things is Scope Creep. Scope creep means that, in addition to the original goal of the project, there are now more things added to the “to do” list. This is a danger to blogs as well. What started as a great way to share your ideas on kangaroo raising has now branched out into stock tips and personal rants. It can happen to anyone, so make sure that you keep your posts on task.
Meeting the Neighbors
Along the lines of getting involved in a community, get to know the people running the other blogs in your area of expertise. Most people relish friendly competition, and this can turn into a pleasant business relationship. For example, there are many SEO Blogs online. Some of the authors of these blogs get together to exchange information, swap stories,… Read the rest
Three Ways to curb Spam on Your Blog
Friday, March 12th, 2010A blog is a great way to get your particular message out to people around the world. Whether you are sharing recipes, business strategies, or trading baseball cards, a blog can become a hub of activity. Naturally, there are people drawn to these places to take advantage of the amount of activity. These people are called spammers. You can tell who they are because they don’t usually add to the conversation, but rather promote their own site. Keeping these people off of your blog will go a long way towards building its legitimacy. Here are three ways to do that.
1) CAPTCHA Them.
First, please forgive the play on words. Okay, a CAPTCHA is a tool for many
blogs and other sites which requires the user to enter the text they see in an image that looks slightly garbled of distorted. We’ve all seen them. CAPTCHA is used to prevent automated software from just scanning a website and filling in their information. This is a classic method for spammers. The best part of this is that implementation is free and has very little impact on the end user. It is readily available for WordPress as an add-on called “SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam 2.2.9”. It’s free so go out and grab it if WordPress is powering your blog.
2) Papers Please
Another way to ensure that the comments left on your blog are legitimate is to require users to register themselves. This is an almost surefire way to make sure that comments left are legitimate. The biggest downside here is that many users may not wish… Read the rest
Tags: Blog Hints, captcha, comments, internet, marketing, seo, spammers
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