With the addition of the rel=author tag and some of Google’s latest Panda updates, it’s important to provide some form of authorship. As a member of the blogosphere, you’re obligated to let people know who you are, along with your expertise and authority. But authorship goes much deeper than contact information; I believe it to be a measure of your activity in regards to open communication and interaction with your communities.  And this can be anything from Facebook and Twitter to Google + and Foursquare.

Obviously, when you register a domain, you’re obligated to submit some sort of e-mail address and basic contact information that gives fans or fellow webmasters an opportunity to contact you. Since private registration has almost become a way of life for most bloggers, it’s almost an obligation to explore the more popular social venues like Facebook and Twitter.

Both let authors provide status updates and tweets about their posts, events, promotions, guest submission and frequently asked questions. Likewise, they are great for answering more personal questions and permitting guest authors to perhaps share some of their own stories. In fact, engagement is very much measurable with third party tools like Hootsuite. Facebook actually has it’s own analytics system called “insights,” which provides users with metrics about their content (i.e. likes, visitors, etc…).

Not only are these tools great gateways for open communication and engagement, but they’re certainly a great way to deliver content as well. Let’s face it, some bloggers have even resorted to simply posting status updates instead of posts. So now instead of regularly posting important information on topics that are of interest or perhaps relate directly to your product or service, you can do so on Facebook. Twitter is a little more complimentary and should be treated as a means for delivering actual blog post links to fans and followers.

And your “followers” or subscribers don’t necessarily have to be fans. For instance, there are a large number of people who follow large organizations like the U.N. (United Nations) and The Clinton Global Initiative (President Clinton and Doug Band). They may be interest in the news they have to offer, but may not agree with all of there standpoints and actions. Yet, it’s still important for these people to interact and share their opinions.

In my opinion, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ are all common portals through which authorship can be exemplified. As these communities continue to grow, so does a reliance on search and decision making in regards to social connection. In other words, people are basing opinions, comparing interest and choosing products based on engagement, which is at the very root of authorship.

Whether they’re acting as a simple substitute to e-mail, or perhaps supplementary to it, they’re worth the time and effort and should be explored by all members of the blogsophere.

No related posts.

Do you want to have more people reading your blog? Though most blog writers would want to have an increase in blog readers, many are not sure how to achieve the readership levels they desire. The following tips will help you attract more readers to your blog at no cost. Once you get familiar with these tips, they will become integrated into your blogging routine and your blog readership will increase within no time.

Write keyword driven content

Your content should be well written and easy to read. You need to focus on creating content which is based on the main keywords that people use to search for information on the particular topic. Search engine optimized writing will help you to significantly increase your blog readership.

Participate in blog carnivals

Blog carnivals are usually hosted in one blog. They include links to many other blog posts that fall within a particular topic. You need to participate in blog carnivals frequently so as to popularize your own blog among writers and readers alike. This has been an effective way of attracting more readers to my blog which features ediet coupons and weight watchers discounts.

Comment in related blogs

Identify blogs that are somewhat related to your blog and read the articles that have been posted there. When you write strong comments in related blogs and leave a link back to your site or blog, you will attract more blog readers since people will want to know what more you have to offer on the subject matter.

Use the comments section to facilitate conversation

Ask your readers for their opinions regarding a specific topic. Respond to as many comments as you can. Frequent interaction with your readers will increase their chances of returning. They are also more likely to tell others about your blog. This will result in more blog readers.

If you apply these four tips, then increasing your blog readership will not be a difficult task. All you need is the ability to engage with the industry or niche that you are blogging about. As you become more authoritative and credible, you will find yourself attracting an increasing number of readers.

Author Bio

Charles Mburugu often writes about internet marketing and e-Commerce. He also blogs about coupon deals at discount blogs that share weight watchers discounts and ediet coupons. He is currently writing for a coupon site that offers weight watchers promo and ediets online promo code.

Related posts:

1. Why Blog Posting Frequency is Important?
2. Blogging Tips and Tricks
3. I Know 11 Killer Reasons of Blog Failure

• Lack of patience & hard work
• We have lot of expectations,
• We think that traffic will automatically come,
• Our stats will touch high numbers and even will beat big names in industry,
• We also think that we will have lot of comments and will receive uncountable guest posts to publish.
• We will start earning a huge amount of money.

I was thinking about some survey or poll that can show us the number of bloggers and their blogging time period since they are blogging. For more detailed and accurate results, we need a large readership so that we have a trend in blogging time period. I searched for net and landed on Problogger’s blog.

He already conducted the survey via creating a poll and exactly fulfills our need of having large audience. I participated in poll and viewed the results. Results were highly skewed towards blog failure ratio. Bloggers blogging from 3 months and from 3-6 months attracted the attention. (Please note that we are considering “Less than 3 months” figure as base for our analysis)

Survey Link

Only 40% of bloggers continued blogging till 3^rd to 6^th month and 25% continued blogging till 9th month. Results are very interesting when you further interpret it. Only 21% of bloggers continued blogging till first year.

What does all this stats means? It is crystal clear that a newbie is very energetic when he starts blogging, but within first three months they lose their hope and quit blogging.

These results are evident of this cruel truth. Survival for first six months and then continuing requires true dedication. Now question is how we can prepare ourselves for the first six months of blogging to survive? What are the steps and initiative that will make us champ in this time period?

Motivate Yourself

First rule is to motivate yourself. Your thoughts, thinking and your attitude towards blogging are very important. You need to have a lot of patience and courage to face the first six months of your blogging journey. Daily traffic stats and no comments will discourage you, but keep in mind every blogger starts with zero.

Train yourself; prepare your mind to face these expected situations and promise yourself not to give up. If you do all these things, you will find yourself much motivated and situation will turn in your favor.

Develop a Writing Routine

People like to visit such sites whose content is refreshed on daily or at least on regular basis. If you are unable to write on daily basis, set posting schedule for you and strictly follow it.

Updating your blog on regular interval is much better than non regular or more frequent posting. Your readers will get used to your sites’ updating frequency. Too much posting will also kill your blog. Because later on you will not be able to continue this tempo due to work load and will start losing your readership. Find out your productive working hours to maximum the output in possible less time. Be smart.

Killer Content

Blogging is not a simple writing job. You need to attract people to read your blog. They are loyal readers of big names in your niche. Regular stuff will not attract them. You need to brainstorm and produce unique ideas for your content. Such idea/article that is never published will force the visitors to become your site reader.

Optimize Your Every Post for SEO

Don’t underestimate the power of generic traffic. They are cheap and easy to get just with a little know how of basic Search engine optimization. You need to include every post in search engine indexation. Avoid black hat SEO, use white hat SEO tricks for long lasting results and learn from big SEO Company’s mistake.

Write for Your Readers

Don’t make your blog an operational or technical manual of a product. No one will like your blog and will let it to die naturally. People want to share their views by participating in your blog’s community. Technical jargons and stuff is totally useless.

Blogs are also not meant for search engine. If you are only targeting search engine, rest assure bots, crawlers and spiders would be your best friends for all time and all of they don’t comment.

Write your content for humans, so that they can digest and discuss it online. More your readers are involved in your blog, more your blog’s buzz will spread around.

Engage Your Readers

Have you noticed, tech and gadget blogs don’t have comments or very few comments if we compare to the blogs that are non tech. Reason is they are aimed to give you latest news and development for the products.

All you need to engage your readers by opting in various techniques,

• Held a contest,
• Encourage them to participate in Polls,
• Provide a platform to discuss the issues,
• Ask questions etc.
• Held some interesting quiz,

Networking

Networking within your niche will considerably boost your motivation and traffic. Remember, no man is an island. You have to have strong social networking with bloggers, readers and commentators.

You have an easy opportunity to have good social networking with your commentators. Top commentator widget will help you to reward your commentators. Announce top five commentators in a post to encourage them.

Stumbleupon, Reddit, Digg are treasures of traffic. Participate in communities; exchange of e-mail ids will greatly help you. Don’t forget to guest post on high traffic blog within your niche.

These are steps and initiatives that will take you out of tough period of blogging career. If you have more ideas to share, please come up and share your views.

Related posts:

1. Work Like an Ant for Survival of Your Blog
2. How to Earn Money from Blogging
3. No One is Helping You Out? – Let’s Steal Our SEO Strategy from The Big Boys!

Now put yourself in the shoes of person who is good but living in nitrous area or they have bad neighbors. In both situations he will be penalized. But why we are discussing good neighbors and bad neighbors in a blog post?  Because, a blog is also a neighborhood of sorts. Both good and bad blogs exsist.

Blogs have generally two types of bad neighborhoods. One in which he is living and second one to which he has linked his blog site too.

Living in Bad Neighborhoods:-

Most of the blogs who are in their initial or intermediary phase use shared hosting services for hosting. Such servers share the same IP for all sites hosted on it. Now if one of these other sites is performing a suspicious SEO technique that site will get banned and there is a good chance that your site will also get banned due to same shared IP address. Do a little investment and purchase a dedicated IP for your website. A dedicated IP would not only give you peace of mind but it also speeds up your site as a shared IP bears more load. This is another reason why web hosting service providers offer dedicated IP address as a separate product. Check how many and which sites are hosted on Same IP as yours.

Linking to Bad Neighborhoods:-

This is very common type of bad neighborhood. Google bans web sites due to black hat SEO practices like copyright infringement, link farming, hidden links, deceptive titles etc. All of these techniques are known as black hat SEO used to illegitimately optimize page rank. Such sites, when caught, are banned by Google forever.

How to Avoid:-

After discussing the bad neighborhood concept, one thing is clear and that is don’t link to such sites. But how do you know which sites are marked as bad neighborhoods or banned by Google. It’s very simple. Just type site:abc.com in Google search bar and see the results. If Google is not showing the results, it’s most likely that Google has banned that site. Google has removed all indexed and cached files of the site to penalize him.

Before linking to a site, just check the site by adopting the above described method. Links to all sites which are banned or blocked will cost you reduced Page Rank because Google consider you as the part of same bad neighborhood.

Related posts:

1. Do You Love Your Blog?
2. Lets get Second Click, Reduce Bounce Rate
3. Future Page Rank and Our Strategy

But first what is bounce rate?

As per Googles’ definition, bounce rate is;

Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.

Source: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=81986

So it is clear now that bouncing terminology in blogging is used when users exit from the page where they landed. In other words when landing page and exit page is same, it is referred as bounce and when converted into percentage we hear terminology, bouncing rate.

Lower the bouncing rate, higher the user spent time on your blog and more pages are viewed.

After this explanation and understanding concept of bouncing rate, let’s do some find out reason and their remedy.

Using Ir-relevant and Poor Keywords:-

Most of us are using the keywords that are not relevant to our blog but they do generate traffic. For example, movies, actresses and sex keywords are totally irrelevant for a tech blog and resulting in generating totally irrelevant traffic. Visitors landed on your site through keyword will definitely exit at once because they didn’t found material of their interest.

Compelling Headline:-

One great reason for higher bounce rate is the posts’ headline itself. This issue can be addressed in many ways. Sometimes you are not fulfilling the promise made in headline. And sometime headline is not compelling. In both ways, visitors are not interested in browsing your site anymore. So choose such headline which forces the visitors to read the post.

Low Quality Content:-

Even after using relevant and right keywords, we still face higher bounce rate. Because our articles’ content is poor and not eye catching. We are not properly using graphics for our article. We write whole matter in two or three paragraphs, thus making our article like a newspaper with long long column.

Read What is And How to Write Unique Content?

Poor Site Navigation:-

Site navigation also plays vital role for increasing bounce rate. Users immediately quite the sites which are hard to navigate and they don’t find relevant content with ease. Use different plugin and tools to make your site navigation easier.

Solution:-

• Use rich and relevant keywords,
• Use graphics, paragraphs and proper font size for your content.
• Use plugins like page navigation.
• Use similar, favorite and recent post plugins.
• Use links within your content to increase interest in site.  
• Fulfill the promise made in post title.
• Get help from your friends. Show them your high bounce rated pages and ask for the problem. They will definitely catch the reason and tell you.

Important Links:

Google Analytics

Statcounter

Related posts:

1. How I Optimized Google Adsense to Earn More (Part II)
2. Future Page Rank and Our Strategy
3. Oh No! Am I in Bad Blog Neighborhood?

Do we miss any other quality of a blogger? Yes that is ability of “In depth Analysis”. It is a must have quality for a successful blogger.

All bloggers a have a common problem of traffic generation. They do invest in different strategies to increase traffic. Some are doing advertisement on Google and pay for it. Without proper analysis and planning investing in any strategy in waste of money. First, identify the problematic area that is not generating traffic for your site then invest in proper tool.

Read I Know 11 Killer Reasons of Blog Failure

Basically we have three main sources of traffic for our website;

• Direct traffic
• Referring traffic
• Search Engines.

To start your analysis to find out the weak area, Google analytics is best free tool available on the net. Google analytics shows you the detailed traffic source for your website in shape of a pie chart with three different colors described in legend. This simple chart is presenting the true picture of your traffic.

A good balance of traffic from these three sources is compulsory for a blogger. You need to work on the source/s from where you are getting less traffic.

Say your referral source of traffic is generating 20% or less traffic, then this is the area to work out instead of spending money in Google Adwords. Maybe Google Adwords is generating maximum traffic for your site. All you need to make a proper strategy for traffic generation from different referral sites. Use bookmarking sites and social networking sites to solve the problem. Sites like Digg, Twitter, StumbleUpon and Facebook are common source of traffic referral.

Read Social Networking, Way to Increase Traffic

In second case, If the search engine source is generating less traffic, optimize your site for search engine and apply various SEO techniques to improve your site. Use themes or plugins that are search engine optimized. “Simple Tags” is a good plugin that enhances your visibility on search engine by optimizing your post tags.

Read Importance of Categories in SEO

Read 12 Essential Plugins for WordPress

By adopting proper strategy according to situation you can maximize traffic for your site without paying money to third party to generate traffic for your site.

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2. Lets get Second Click, Reduce Bounce Rate
3. 9 Reasons to Self Host Your WordPress Blog

If you want to be a successful blogger, you need to follow some Guru’s advice and instructions. They will obviously share their experience with you. But what to do in a situation where no one is really helping you or he is not sharing his success secrets. Why not to use some intelligence here to help yourself, instead begging for help. Here I have a solution, why not to steal some clues from blogging gurus. What would you say, isn’t that a good idea? I am totally against of such type of practices like stealing etc. Actually we are going to do some in-depth analysis but I am naming it stealing because we are doing all this without permission of owner of blog. So let’s steal some ideas and clues to find out answers to our questions.

First of all we need to list at least four or five blogging Gurus for our project IGI (I am Going In – My favorite Pc game by codemaster ).

After making a list of four to five Big Boys, this is not Big Boy of Bollywood alledged Star Amitabh Bachan; but is A Big Blogger, we are going to analyze the SEO strategy of these Big Boys.

Friends, sitemap submissions to search engines play a vital role. In my opinion, almost 70% of future site ranking depends on it. A good sitemap with a proper configuration is vital. If your site map is not properly configured, then all your hard work is in vain, let me say that again.  If your sitemap is not properly configured, then your hard work is in vain!

Basic Sitemap Setting:-

The WordPress plugin for Google sitemap has many options in which there are some basic settings. Set these settings as per your liking, for instance, notify Bing, Google, Ask etc. Building mode has two options and I recommend marking a check in both check boxes to decrease our time wasting our efforts. Then come to post priority setting. Better to select don’t use automatic priority calculation. Manual prioritizing is good option. We have values ranging from 0.0 to 1.0 where 1.0 is the highest value.

Now Stealing the Setting from Big Boys:-

Here we have analyzed and observed the Big Boys blog for the setting of:

• Tags,
• Categories,
• Achieves,
• Author pages,
• Their change frequency,
• And Priority for indexing.

Let’s start our mission. We will analyze the sitemap setting of big blogs from their sitemap.xml. For this purpose open the internet explorer, type the site name followed by “/sitemap.xml”. It means that complete address would seem this;

www.yourbigblogger.com/sitemap.xml

and you have output stating all hidden and compulsory settings from which we found answers of some important questions.

• Shall I include tags in sitemap?
• Shall I include category in sitemap?
• Shall I include achieve in sitemap?
• What should be change frequency?
• How much prioritizing number should be allocated?

After analyzing the Big Boys sites, we found that, they have included tags and categories in their sitemap, resulting in increased number of indexed file in search engine and increased internal site links, a definite SEO Boost.

Archive was not included by most of Big Boys while others did. It might be they have some solution to avoid duplicate content. My recommendation is not to include archive in your sitemap to avoid duplicate content. Analysis also gave us an inside of priority ranking of their site contents.

So our recommended setting for sitemap, after analyzing the Big Boys is;

• Include Tag and Category in site map with 70% (0.7) daily change priority.
• Don’t include archive in sitemap. Give it 0.0 priorities.
• Don’t include authors’ page in sitemap.
• Posts and static page should be given same priority with daily basis.
• Allocate 100% (1.0) priority and daily or hourly change frequency to your home page.

Related posts:

1. Survival Strategy in First Six Months of Blogging
2. Lets get Second Click, Reduce Bounce Rate