Hi, I have developed a blog with the same content theme as my website and I am hoping to use it to drive traffic to my site. How can I tell though if the blog has 'no follow' tags? (I am using www.blogger.com). Does any one have any tips on using a blog to drive traffic and improve SEO? Thanks a lot
View the page's source code, I forget what the shortcut is in Internet Explorer but with Firefox just press CTRL + U and do a search for the rel="nofollow" tag.
The best advice I saw on this is to not post the exact same content to the blog(s) as the site. Your blog should contains links to the site you want to promote and some other highly relevent and highly reputable sites. The blog could contain summaries of emails you receive about your site -- becoming a kind of FAQ. It could contain shorter, rewritten versions o some of the material you post to the main site. It could contain material which relates to your main site but which you do not wnat to post there. If you host at blogger, make sure you have configured Google to add your blog to its public areas. It does not hurt to make your blog's RSS feeds available through FeedBurner or a similar service and it does not hurt to take the time to adds Technorati tags to your blog posts. This is a little more work, but the point is to create internet buzz about your site. Even though this is very low level buzz, it is highly relevent.
Even better to develop a hybrid blog/website - that's what i did with my website by customising wordpress... http://www.contemporary-artists.info/ (Not allowed Post Links Yet... ) If you're using firefox there is an excellent extension that's been discussed here before - its called searchstatus. Its a toolbar, a very small one that shows you the google page rank and the alexa rank. it has a little menu through which you can view backlinks (on Google, Yahoo, MSN), pages indexed and it also has an option to highlight nofollow links. All links that have the nofollow attribute come up highlighted - its very handy for what you are describing. If you're not using firefox yet then this is the perfect excuse - it really is an excellent little tool - as far as i know it registers your browsing to alexa which means that sites you visit will appear in alexa. My sites seem to shoot up on alexa when i started to use this toolbar. You can find the search status extension for firefox at: http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/ There's a list of 150 or so directories and feed aggragators you can submit your site to at - submitting to these takes a couple of days work but its well worth it - you can find some nice high ranking pages to get your blog on. Once in these your blog will be indexed regularly by the major search engines. http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/ and there's great advice on marketing your blog on: http://www.paulstamatiou.com/2005/11/03/how-to-boost-your-blog-traffic/ Make sure you're pinging http://pingomatic.com/ when you write updates. and for monetizing and problogging check out: http://www.problogger.net/ www.performancing.com/ I read these every day sad as i am... Then i guess its just designing your blog so there is an incentive to go to your website. and that's the design. you could visually integrate the two. good luck!
Yes blogs to drive traffic to your site. In fact just to tell you I got my brand new website indexed and also got PR passed on by just placing their link on my blogroll links. This is very true!!! Keep posting good contents to your blog and watch how traffic increase to your site if you have enough links to your site all over your blog.
I couldn't believe the difference between my blog and my website. I built my website and it took me months to get indexed - i guess i didn't know anything about getting links at that stage. but my blog, the day after it was published, msn, yahoo and google had all been in. It was doing well on the msn on the second day. it was in the google index that day too. I guess its all down to links and its easier to get great links to a blog from what i can see. Thats why i decided to go for a blog/website hybrid so i could submit to get both all the blog related links and the art (my subject area) related links. All three major engines and numerous feed aggragators are indexing the site every day - its incredible the difference. Still lots of work to do on traffic but its a good start... Thomas http://www.contemporary-artists.info
blogs just wanna have fun. it's just a simple way to think up content, and then publish it 3 minutes later.