Twitter RSS Feeds

You can publish your tweets via an RSS feed. Simply log into your Twitter account, and scroll to the very bottom of your profile page where you will see a RSS button available.

Click on the link to load the page where you will be given the option to subscribe to the feed using a variety of RSS readers including Google, Live Bookmarks and Bloglines.

Browser Plugins

There are also Firefox plugins designed for use with Twitter that make it even easier to stay up to date. As you can see, the Twitter community is consistently expanding and as it does, additional applications and programs will be available, so it’s an exciting time to join the community.

TweetBar: One of the most popular plugins that displays Tweets within a sidebar in your browser. Works with Flock as well.

http://www.mikedemers.net/projects/tweetbar

TwitterBar:

http://spatialviews.com/twitterbar

This app makes it easy to post tweets based on current websites that you are browsing. You can easily add notes to the websites that you showcase.

TwitterFox: Displays a pop-up notification when new tweets are posted on the Twitter network.

http://www.naan.net/trac/wiki/TwitterFox

As you can see, Twitter is far more extensive than what it may appear at first glance, and as the popularity of Twitter grows, so will all of the options available to its users.

Since Twitter is open source, it allows developers to create all sorts of valuable applications and utilities that will continue to improve the Twitter community.

Explore the different tools that are available and put them to good use for your Twitter marketing campaign.

From instant website updates, to easy management of Tweets, there are so many possibilities to make Twitter work for you, regardless of what niche market or industry you are involved with.

Setting your permalinks correctly will help you rank better because they will contain relevant keywords based on the different page content that you create.

Click on “Permalinks” from within the “Settings” area.

Click on the “Custom” option and paste the following into the text box (double check for accuracy to ensure it matches with no extra spaces)

/%postname%/:

To include the category, you change it to:

/%category%/%postname%/.

Doing this will transform your URL’s into search engine friendly ones, and will also include the titles of each of your posts and pages, while instantly formatting them correctly.

For example, if you created a post with the title “Circus Clowns”, the URL to that post would look like this:

http://www.yourblog.com/circus-clowns.html

Important Note:
If you had already created posts, you will want to ensure that those who visit your older URL’s are instantly redirected to your new pages. You can use the free “Redirection Plugin” to ensure that people are not directed to nonexistent pages. You only need to do this if you have already published content on your blog.

Redirection Plugin: http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/redirection/

The next step is to ensure that your blog is included within search engines like Google, but also blog based communities such as Technorati.

In order to do this, click on the Privacy tab and click the link that indicates your blog will be visible to everyone, including search engines.

Click “Save Changes” to complete this step.

Let’s take a look at the options under the “Discussion” tab.

You will want to ensure that the first three options are enabled, so that other blogs are notified whenever you link to them, and that you are allowing pingbacks and trackbacks.

The best way to think about pingbacks is as remote comments:
1)Person A posts something on his blog.

2)Person B posts on her own blog, linking to Person A’s post. This automatically sends a pingback to Person A when both have pingback-enabled blogs.

3)Person A’s blog receives the pingback, then automatically goes to Person B’s post to confirm that the pingback did, in fact, originate there.

The pingback is generally displayed on Person A’s blog as simply a link to Person B’s post.

In this way, all editorial control over posts rests exclusively with the individual authors (unlike the trackback excerpt, which can be edited by the trackback recipient).

The automatic verification process introduces a level of authenticity, making it harder to fake a pingback.

Trackbacks are a way to notify blog systems that you’ve linked to them. If you link other WordPress blogs they’ll be notified automatically using pingbacks, so no other action necessary.

Whenever you begin to write a post in WordPress, you will see the option to provide a trackback to another blog, in the event your post is related to another website.This is essential in marketing your blog.

You’re a blogger and are constantly hearing about pinging… The thing is, you don’t know what it is and what it can do for your blog. I did not know either to begin with.
Well that’s fine because a lot of bloggers don’t quite
understand pinging.

What is pinging?

When a blog is pinged, it essentially tells a web blog tracking system that the blog has been updated. So, pinging is the process of telling these tracking services that a site has been updated.

So how does pinging work?

A ping service scans regularly blogs for updates. Whenever there is a new update for a particular blog, that is reported back to the pinging service’s site.

You can almost think of ping services being just like
search engine spiders—both scan sites looking for information, and both report that information back. The difference is, a ping service only reports back new blog
posts.

Why is pinging useful for my blog?

Pinging, in effect, tells people that there is a new blog
posting available. Those who are loyal followers of your blog will see the ping and want to visit your blog.
Pinging helps to increase your traffic because it tells
people when your blog is updated.

Those who visit sites with pinging services will see this information in the form of a scroll on the left or right side, or top of the page. The scroll is usually in XML format and typically includes the title and URL of your blog, as well as the date and time of the update.

Who offers pinging?

The answer is, there are several pinging services available
which you can use to have your blog pinged.

Weblogs.com

Weblogs.com is probably the most well-known pinging service. Weblogs.com monitors sites for updates and then pings whenever there is an update to report. Virtually every blog software is available to use Weblogs.

Yahoo’s Blo.gs

Another popular pinging service. This one is offered by Yahoo and has a built-in integration with movable type and other tools. One cool thing about this service is that it offers the ability to give out updates via Instant Messenging services like AOL and ICQ.

It is a direct pinging service, so those who sign
up for subscriptions to your blog will be sent an email anytime your blog is updated.

Blogrolling.com

Blogrolling allows its bloggers to manage their
blogrolls(updates) through a web-based interface. Recently
updated blogs are also highlighted on Blogrolling’s web site.
Data is automatically retrieved from other sites like
blogger.com and weblogs.com every 5 minutes. Search on the site first for your URL before signing it up.

Technorati

Available at http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping, Technorati is another service that pings blogs. It gets its data from a variety of places and is definitely a site you should go to for blog pinging.

These are just 4 of the many different blog pinging services
available. A quick search on Yahoo or Google will reveal many other possible blog pinging services to use for your blog. It is best to sign up for as many as you possibly can to ensure that your blog is well-pinged. A well-pinged blog will definitely help your blog attract more visitors. So sign up for as many as possible and watch your blog traffic increase.

There are countless methods that you can use to generate fresh traffic to your blogs. Before we begin however, you should understand what RSS means and how important it is when generating traffic to your blog.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is a method of delivering content on a regular basis to news sites, online publishers, and other blogs.

Bloggers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed that is made available to anyone interested in becoming a subscriber.

The more subscribers you have, the more people are reading your updates and visiting your website.

The great thing about RSS is that you do not have to create it manually, it’s built into the WordPress system, and each time you create a blog post it will be added to your RSS feed.

However, In order to offer your visitors the ability to subscribe to your RSS feed, you will want to subscribe to a free service such as http://www.FeedBurner.com

Feedburner, owned and managed by Google.com, is one of the most popular methods of serving up your RSS feeds through visitor subscriptions.

In addition, Feedburner provides additional information including stats relating to your blog. You can just log into your Feedburner account and look at your stats and charts.

If you manage multiple blogs, you can create and track feeds for all of them with FeedBurner.

Feedburner also makes it extremely easy to encourage your visitors to become RSS subscribers by offering you a piece of code that once inserted into your blog, will offer a RSS subscription box, enabling your visitors to instantly subscribe to your feed.

Once you have created your Feedburner account, you will want to locate the code that allows your readers to use your new Feedburner feed.

You can do this by using the Feedburner plugin available to WordPress users running self hosted blogs.

http://www.google.com/support/feedburner/bin/answer.py?answer=78483

Or you can add it to your sidebar manually, by copy and pasting your Feedburner code into your blogs sidebar.php page to make it available to everyone who visits your blog.

WordPress automatically notifies popular Update Services that you’ve updated your blog by sending a XML-RPC ping each time you create or update a post.

The Update Services process the ping and updates their proprietary indices with your update. So people browsing sites like Technorati can find your most recent posts.

When you look at the pinging services your blog may state that it has failed . You need a list of ping services rather than just one because of this .

WordPress comes with the pingomatic service listed under options within WP itself. An alternative is FeedShark which pings some 60 services free.

Title Tags

Modifying wordpress title tags within the pages that you will create directly affects the SEO of your entire wordpress blog.

To ensure that these are set up correctly you will need to modify the header.php page associated with the current wordpress theme you are using.

Note: Some of the newer wordpress themes are already optimized for SEO, however it’s important to check to ensure that they are before you begin to use the theme.

To do this, click on DESIGN and then click on Theme Editor.

You will see a listing of files associated with your current theme. Look for the one titled “header.php” and click on it to load the code into the editing window.

In order to edit any pages of your theme, you will have to change the permissions of the file by logging into your FTP, clicking on the header.php page and setting the permissions to 777, so it can be writeable (changed).

Once you have made the changes, you can set the permissions back to their default settings.

Within this header.php file, you want to replace the code that is contained within the tag with the following:

elseif (is_single() || is_page() ) { single_post_title(); } elseif (is_search() ) { bloginfo('name'); echo " search results: ";
echo wp_specialchars($s); } else { wp_title('',true); } ?>

Like I mentioned previously, check the current page before modifying it as it may already be optimized this way.

Click “Save” to apply your changes.

There are a few things to keep in mind when you are entering in titles for your blog posts and pages.

Google only shows the first 70 characters of your title within search results, so be sure to include your most important keywords within each title, stripping away any clutter.

You should also focus on using different page titles for each post, and avoid using the same keyword at the start of every page title as well to optimise the wordpress seo results.

Mix it up and be creative with your titles while remaining consistent and taking measures to ensure that each of your titles directly describes the content of each particular page.

Customizing WordPress

Before you launch your blog and make it available to the public, you will want to customize the way it looks as well as the way it functions.

We can do this by uploading a professional theme, and activating it from within our blogs admin area.

There are also a handful of plugins that I strongly suggest when optimizing your blog for best performance in search engines and blog networks.

To start, you can choose a free blog theme from any of the popular template directories online.

While paying a designer to create a customized blog theme will certainly help you gain a bit of edge over the competition, it can be quite costly, so until your blog is generating an income for you, you can always use a free theme, that is clean and well designed.

One of my favorite places to look for themes is on fellow blogger sites, rather than the popular theme directories.

The reason I tend to seek out smaller networks showcasing free templates is for the obvious reason, that fewer bloggers are likely to be using these themes.

The more common a theme is, the less appealing your blog will be since those visiting it would have seen the design on another site before.

One thing that many new bloggers tend to overlook is the unique factor.

Here are a few of the places that I scour for new blog theme releases. Some of these sites offer affordable pay-to-use themes as well, which can be a wise investment and a lot cheaper than paying for a custom design.

http://www.BlogOhBlog.com

Explore the archives for previous releases that are hidden away. Fewer bloggers will notice them, and the quality of Blog Oh Blogs themes is very impressive and easy to work with.

http://www.WPSalon.com

http://www.BloggingPro.com (search the archives)

http://www.BlogsTheme.com

If you are good with editing CSS and HTML, you could choose to purchase one of the more popular premium themes such as the widely used “Revolution” theme by Brian Gardner, but I only suggest using these themes if you have the ability to customize them so they don’t look like the thousands of others using them.

Everyone these days knows what a blog is.  A simple site, written by an individual, to talk about the things that interest them.  But there is another side to blogging, and that side is all about making money.  To do this, as with any site on the Internet, store in the real world, or other business, you need to get people’s attention.  You need to increase site traffic, web reader visibility, and the overall network access of your site.  But finding the time to do this can be awfully consuming, especially if you are trying to manage a household, relationship, or steady nine to five job.  It takes an estimated 4-5 hours each week to keep any given blog up and updated.  If you are trying to run a niche network of several dozen blogs, the time constraints become enormous.

As I mentioned, popularity is the name of the blogging game.  Getting people to read your blog requires that you update often, post your updates on the social bookmarking sites, and then monitor the feedback to give your site a lived in feel. Trying to increase site traffic web users will read is a lot of work.

Like everything on the Internet, there are programs that can do huge amounts of work for you.  The three program suite by Jean-Philippe Schoeffel has been designed to do just that.  You need to increase site traffic web users, and here is how you can.  The first program helps you to update your site from anywhere, at the time of your choosing.  His second program allows you to automate the submission of new blog posts to up to 30 different social bookmarking sites.  His third and final program makes it a snap to download RSS information and use other posts to get you traffic!  If you run a blog or a series of blogs for fun or profit, you should really consider this offer.
Photo Credit: borman81

Click Here To Find Out How To Increase Site Traffic, Web Sales, And More

As you all know, I am really passionate about learning how to increase site traffic (web). I live and breathe it! I’m always trying to cook up new ways to learn about the best strategies to increase site traffic – web-wise – and on one of my Internet surfing trips, I found this awesome article.

I’ve pasted it below to share with you.

Make sure you come back here once you’re done and click on the link at the end of the sentence to learn more about increase site traffic – web sites, blogs, and more!

Generating website traffic is critical to the success of every website. Using social elements of the internet is a great way to send traffic to your site. Read three tips to increase website traffic.

Blog Commenting

People are interested in knowing what other people think, which makes blog commenting incredibly popular. Finding an article relating to your website then providing a useful, informative blog comment can send a new wave of visitors to your website.

If viewers find your comment insightful or entertaining they will be more likely to visit your website to read your other viewpoints on similar topics.

Social Bookmarking

With a wealth of content and new websites added to the internet everyday, a lot of people have taken advantage of social bookmarking sites to categorize their favorite places on the internet.

Adding your website or several articles you’ve written to social bookmarking sites will place your content in front of thousands of visitors. It also gives you the opportunity to target a specific audience through the use of categories and tags.

People who utilize social bookmarking sites will often search through the websites and articles other people are bookmarking which can dramatically increase exposure if your website gains popularity.

Video Marketing

The use of streaming online video has not only gained wide acceptance it will soon become expected by most web users. Creating a video then submitting it for others to watch is a great way to generate traffic.

Using humor or providing a controversial viewpoint on a popular subject will draw lots of views and also encourage viewers to link back to your video. If your video is entertaining viewers will want to visit your website to find similar content.

This article was written by Mack Michaels.

Wasn’t it an interesting read? I hope you enjoyed that article. Check out the info here if you are dying to know more about the best practices I use to increase site traffic. Web sites have never been this good!

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Photo Credit: Nelson D.