Part II: Building Traffic for WordPress Dance Blogs
This post about building traffic for your WordPress blog continues my post from yesterday: Part I: Building Traffic for WordPress Dance Blogs
3) Pinging blog search engines
One of the invaluable benefits of blogging is that your posts can be quickly indexed by both blog search engines and the top search engines. Once I publish a new post, it appears very quickly on Google.
Within the settings section of your WordPress admin panel, there is a sub-section called "Writing." This is where you can list the blog search engines that you want to be notified every time you publish a new post. Here's a screen capture that shows the search engines that will be immediately notified every time I publish a post on the Dancing Interface:
These are the sites listed in the screen shot immediately above:
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
With WordPress blogs, however, it may be sufficient to just ping (notify) the first site on the list Ping-o-Matic. And Ping-o-Matic will, in turn, notify the other blog search engines. (I'm more familiar with Movable Type and I ping: Google, Technorati and Weblogs.com every time I publish a post).
4) Google Sitemaps
A Google Sitemap is an XML file that tells search engines (Google and other top search engines) which files on your website or blog to index and how often each file is updated.
To see an example of a Sitemap, you can visit the one I created for Dancing Interface. Here's a screen shot:
Click for Larger Image:
Google Sitemaps do not necessarily improve how your website is ranked by top search engines. They simply notify top search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask) about which pages to crawl on your site and when to do it. Sitemaps are especially useful for new websites/blogs, sites that are organized in a manner that makes it difficult for search engines to know what content to spider and for dynamically-generated content. Overall, my guess is that Sitemaps are helpful because they are telling search engines what and when to index your site. Plus, there's no downside to installing a Sitemap.
To create the Google Sitemap for Dancing Interface, I used the Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress plug-in.
As you'll see in the following screen shot the options for customizing your Google Sitemaps are extensive. And I'm showing less than half of the available options. But other than configuring Yahoo notifications, I don't think I'd have to change too many parameters.
Click for Larger Image:
In Final Post About WordPress
In the third and final post for this series, I'll cover:
- Google Analytics: Tracking inbound and outbound links for your blog, and
- Adding links for social bookmarking and social networking sites in order to generate more traffic.
Posted by
Doug Fox on April 24, 2009 5:10 AM
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