There was a time when three bloggers came upon a little shed, people called a hoster. They had been travelling for days to see that hosting plan which was said to relieve the blogosphere from all its pain. Our three bloggers walked inside and praised these brand new servers. They brought gifts with them, they had a brand new WordPress installation and one of them carried a cpanel on his backup. The third blogger pulled an ebook out of his pocket. While the stars were shining outside the datacenter, more and more bloggers came to see these 3 travellers. The word of mouth reached them and made them rush to the site. They told each other stories about the foreigners, left their cards and unconsciously invented social media.
Several years later, the newborn had become a problogger and shared his wisdom with everyone to help them against the evil bloggers. From now on, they started meeting up every week and holding pubcons where they prayed for more traffic, more comments on their blogs and more revenue from advertising.
And if they haven´t been buried on digg, they are still blogging every day.

Thank you for visiting my blog. There are new posts here every day. Staying updated is easy: Just subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe to FREE eMail updates. Thanks for visiting!

Why does an optimized homepage title for your blog offer great value to your SEO efforts and adds visibility to your whole blog?

The homepage title is one of the most important factors when it comes to SEO. You can easily find proof of this. Go to google.com and type in anything you like. Look at the first few results and you will see that these sites do have your search query near the beginning of their page title and they do have it within the page content.

We will now come to how to change the default setting of how WordPress displays the homepage title to a highly optimized manner without using a plugin for that.

By default, most WordPress themes will show the homepage title like this:

YOUR BLOG TITLE » YOUR POST TITLE

This is defined in the header.php within the respective themes folder. You will find the following near the top of the file: (without the spaces, I added.)

<title><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> » <?php wp_title(); ?></title>

This is not very optimal for SEO purposes. bloginfo(’name’) is the title of your blog and wp_title(); represents the title of a single post. We want to have the post title being shown before the blog title.

Changing this into a more optimized presentation of your titles is very easy.
You just have to move your post title before your blog title. That´s it.
All you have to do is to open the header.php from the themes folder of the theme you are actually using.

Find this code near the top of the file:

<title><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> » <?php wp_title(); ?></title>

and change it to: (again, skip the spaces I added!)

<title><?php wp_title(); ?> » <?php bloginfo(’name’); ?></title>

Now save the file and upload it to its themes folder. No second step, we are done. Look at the top of your browser window. This page is titled

What will be more important when someone would search for it? I moved the post title to the beginning and slightly changed the title. By default, this page would have been titled

If you want to learn more about this, please read these great articles related to this topic:

• How To: Make Search Engines Like Your WordPress Blog
• Wordpress Hacking for Better Blog Titles
• SEO A Wordpress Blog - The Optimal Title
• Blog SEO - How to Optimize Your Blog for the Search Engines
• Reverse Blog Name and Post Title in WordPress Title
• Better SEO Page Title for WordPress
• SEO for Wordpress
• Google your Wordpress Blog

Please let me know, whether this was useful for you or not. Thank you.

How cool is that? My blog has been nominated “Best Blog about Blogging 2008″ on BloggersChoiceAwards. It was Diana Bajenaru from 134u.com who nominated me for this. Thanks, Diana. Diana´s blog is almost exactly the same age as mine, she is blogging since September 2007, but made it to #60 on my Blogs about Blogging Toplist.

Please vote for marcorichter.net, if you like it. Thank you so much.

This makes the last post of this series. For me it was great fun and I hope, you could generated some serious extra traffic for your blog by following the previous 24 articles. Please let me know about your experiences.

This series has so far received more that 6.000 visitors, which is more than a months total number by now. What a success for me. More important, the number of RSS-subscribers raised from ~40 to 138 today, look:

It has been rising before the series, but from the start of it, the raise goes even steeper.

Questions to readers:

• Did you like the series and want more?
• Have you written a series on some topic yourself?

My next series will be a bit different, it´s about blogging mistakes, but I´d like to try some new of distribution for it. …coming soon

This article is part of my series:
The 25 best ways to increase traffic to your blog. Please read the other 24 articles and you will definitely increase your blog traffic.

I have just received an email from George Manty over at Can I Make Big Money Online. They are holding a contest for their new barter site called “Barter Genius“. They are giving away 500 dollars to one lucky winner. This is an entry into the contest. For more details about the contest click here.

From the contest site:

The contest is open from today until the end of the month. A winner will be chosen at random from the entries. The winner will receive USD $500. The winner will be announced by January 15th.

Linking out to other blogs can increase your traffic. Sounds backwards to you? Here´s how sending out visitors to other blogs helps you increase your own traffic.

A link to an article on another blog provides your readers with additional, valuable information about your topic. This increases the value of your post tremendously. People get more value from your post and will notice, maybe bookmark you or even subscribe to your blog with hope of more value to come.

The other blogger, who you have linked to, will definitely notice the link. Bloggers are statistic addicts and will probably check for new links to their blogs on a regular basis. Most of them will try to give back the link live you gave them in some way. Maybe tomorrow, in a week or at another point in future. Depending on the quality of your posts, you may also gain a new regular reader of your blog, especially if you share similar topics.

Plus, by linking to another blog post, you´ll create a trackback on it, which appears within the comment section of the linked post. I am receiving a good share of my traffic via these trackback links.

This article is part of my series:
The 25 best ways to increase traffic to your blog. Please read the other 24 articles and you will definitely increase your blog traffic.

For blogs, there is one tool almost every blogger does come to use at one point of time to make the most out of his or her blog. It´s FeedBurner and there are good reasons to use it, whatever blogging platform you use.

FeedBurner is republishing your blogs RSS-Feed and adds some feature to it making it even more useful and user-friendlier.

Reasons to use FeedBurner
The most interesting reason to use FeedBurner is, that thy enable you to know how many people are subscribed to your RSS-Feed. As these readers are the ones who keep coming back to your blog, you should be interested in their number and how it has developed over time.

Your readers can easily subscribe to your Feed if it is handled by FeedBurner. They are offering a wide variety of services to use for reading your content. Starting with email or Newsgator, people can also use Bloglines or MyYahoo and many other services to keep up with your blog.

Best of all: Many bloggers do start their blogs on hosted platforms like Blogger, WordPress.com or whatever. They´d lose all of their subscribers when they decide to move the blog to its own domain as the URL of their RSS-Feed will change. No problem with FeedBurner here as this URL can stay the same as it is a FeedBurner URL like mine:

I could use this URL even if I´d move this blog to a domain totally different. Even though, I won´t do this.

Showing your subscriber count
Just yesterday, I put a litte chicklet to my sidebar, showing how many people are subscribing to my feed. At this moments there are:

There were discussions round the blogosphere whether bloggers should display subscriber count. I have chosen to display it now as the count is getting to a stable basis.

Do you think there is an effect on this? Are people more likely to subscribe when they see that many others have before?

FeedBurner FeedFlare
The FeedFlare feature adds some information to the end of each entry what can look like this:

This can make readers of your RSS-Feed click through to your site to leave a comment or something. Again, more visitors for your blog.
You can easily change these infos or add more of them to your feed. Just go to your FeedBurner-Account and click on Optimize and then FeedFlare. Select the items you want to show and that´s it.
There is even an API which lets you create your very own FeedFlares, I´m planning to write an own article about APIs in the future.

Subscription by E-Mail
FeedBurner also provides the possibiliy to let your readers receive an E-Mail whenever a new article is being posted. To not overcrowd your readers inbox, you can choose to send one E-Mail a day at a chosen timeframe. Just scroll down a little bit to find the 2 ways to subscribe to my blog.

I am offering the E-Mail option for my readers, but it does not seem to be accepted that much. This may be different for oher blogs, especially depending on their topics and their readers. For me, it´s only about 3% of all my subscribers using the option to follow my blog via E-Mail.

Do you offer E-Mail subscription on your blog? How does it work for you?

This article is part of my series:
The 25 best ways to increase traffic to your blog. Please read the other 24 articles and you will definitely increase your blog traffic.