Make Your Blog More Popular With These Tips and Free Tools

Posted on December 2nd, 2008 by Peggy Duncan

If you’re already blogging, great! If not, what the heck are you waiting for? It’s probaby THE best way to ensure you’re showing up in the search engines.

Here are some enhancements to consider.

Note: SuiteMinute is a self-hosted WordPress blog so I’m able to add code/scripts for more functionality. Click here to read my post for the SCORE blog (opens in new window) about why you’ll want to do this too.

Add TV channel. I wanted to add a page to my blog with a collection of videos and thumbnails much like the big news channels. I found a free technology that’s what I needed at Viddler (www.Viddler.com): thumbnails of each video with a bigger screen to play whichever one I choose. I uploaded some videos and then created a vidget reel (you’ll see Vidgets at the bottom of their homepage). Clicking on any one of the thumbnails moves it to the big screen ready for play. As I load new videos at Viddler.com, my vidget updates automatically on my site.Viddler has more functionality than YouTube, so I use both. See the tab above for SuiteTV for Viddler and check out YouTube.com/PeggyDuncanHelpsYou to see the difference.
Advertise your own stuff. I removed all Google ads from my blog (they only produced pennies). Now I advertise my public workshops and Webinars. I created all the banners in PowerPoint, saved them as jpegs, inserted into the sidebar of the blog, and hyperlinked them to my main Web site.
Create posts with ease. Instead of creating posts directly in clunky WordPress, I’m using Windows Live Writer, a free, computer-based, WYSIWYG editor from Microsoft. This editor makes it much easier and faster to format text, insert graphics, publish, and more.
Make posts easy to share. I added a free plug-in that automatically adds a Share This icon at the bottom of each blog post. The icon represents communities such as Digg, StumbleUpon, etc., and with one click, a reader can share the entry. There are several similar free technologies to choose from: Bookmarkify (www.Bookmarkify.com), AddtoAny (www.addtoany.com), and AddThis (AddThis.com). TweetThis (richardxthripp.thripp.com/tweet-this) makes it easy for visitors to tweet about your post.
Add links to other articles after each post. I use a free plug-in, Yet Another Related Posts Plugin that automatically adds entries at the end of each post based. The entries show up on single posts only mitcho.com/code/yarpp
Improve your page titles. Your page titles are as important as content and post title. Whatever shows in the bar of your browser at the very top of your screen is what Google puts in the search results. If your top bar says “Home” that’s what Google will read. That’s why it’s so important to make your title tags descriptive.
Get more flexibility adding text to page titles. For more flexibility with what you can do with your titles, you’ll want to add the plug-in, All In One SEO Pack (AIOSP). This video tutorial explains its use better than I can. I was glad I found it because I needed to add a blog title in WordPress Settings. But whenever I did, whatever I typed as the title printed across my header graphic. When I removed it, my posts showed up in RSS Readers with “No Title.” AIOSP solved the problem. I was able to delete the blog title in the default WordPress Settings and add it to AIOSP instead. Now as you can see, I can type anything in the title, but it doesn’t show up in the header graphic. (The video will make all this clear.)
Add Meta Tags automatically. Back in the day, META tags were the second most important thing for your site next to content. Not anymore, except for Yahoo and some other smaller search engines (for Google, it’s the title tag as described in the previous point). The Head META Description plug-in automatically adds META tags to each of your posts that will include the first few lines of text on a page or the post excerpt. Here is the download and info.
Create mobile version. Mofuse is a plug-in that detects when someone is coming to your blog from a handheld device and will offer up a mobile version of it.
Publicize your blog to the world. There are many ways to promote your blog. Two include listing it with Technorati.com (an Internet search engine for blogs) and BlogCatalog.com (a social blog directory where thousands of blog sites are searched, rated, and reviewed).
Create a sitemap. A sitemap organizes the information on your Website or blog and puts all the data a search engine needs in one place. It doesn’t boost your rankings but it makes it easier for search engines to index your site. Try this free online sitemap generator.
Create a blidget for virability. See this previous post about creating the scrollable box you see in the right sidebar.

I’m constantly looking for more plug-ins to add to my blog and will update you later. In the meantime, if you’ve discovered any that you like, I’d appreciate it if you’d leave a comment.

P.S. I’ve published an ebook on shameless self-promotion that includes my secrets for getting found online. Check it out.