If you use google analytics on your blog, here is a small clue on how to get your own visits to your blog filtered for it.
As a blogger, you will probably visit your own site very often, to answer comments or check design tweaks or what ever.

All these hits are being tracked by analytics by default. But with this little trick, you can trigger the analytics code only when another user visits your blog, but not when you visit it.

Put this to your footer.php just before the </body>-Tag.

<?php
get_currentuserinfo() ;
global $user_level;
if ($user_level != 10) {
echo'
<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
_uacct = "UA-XXXXXX-X“;
urchinTracker();
</script>
‘;
}
?>

And replace the XXXXXX-X with your actual analytics-ID. From now on, every time when you visit your blog, while you are logged in as an admin, the analytics code won´t be triggered.

The if ($user_level != 10) checks, whether the visitor is an admin (WordPress-UserLevel = 10).

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This guest post submitted by Alex Sysoef, Publisher of WordPress Web 2.0 Guide Blog and author of Web 2.0 Wealth System.

WordPress is without a doubt one of the most flexible scripts when it comes to pure functionality available straight out of the box and became blogging platform of choice for thousands of bloggers. People love it because it simply works!

But just because functionality is there and readily available doesn’t mean it can’t be improved. And that is where WordPress truly shines by supplying a wealth of plugins that allow us to take it beyond its intended use. Comments system is crucial to blog interaction and in this post I want to discuss how a few plugins can greatly enhance what is already available.

To make the process simple and meaningful we will take a staged approach and discuss which plugins apply at each stage and why.

Stage 1. Improve Administrative Tasks

Replying and controlling comments on your blog is a big part of daily blogging routine. And to make it simpler we will use a few plugins to streamline the process and prevent unneeded work.

Better Comments Manager is a superb plugin to streamline your tasks of replying to comments, controlling them and allows many functions not available in core. Some of the more notable would be threaded reply and listing all comments for specific post to manage them.

Spam Karma 2 is the best of the bread spam protection for your blog. Unfortunately comment spam is one of the biggest problems that we, as bloggers have to deal with and this plugin removes 99% of them. But what do you do with remaining? Use Bad Behavior plugin to remove an additional 0.9% and then you only have one or two comments every once in a while to delete. Not too shabby, huh?

Lucia’s Linky Love is another plugin you might want to consider if you believe that good comments should be rewarded by providing a full SEO enabled link to their blog. Allows you to reward your regular commentators on autopilot once you configure the options to your liking. I personally Do Follow links from good comments on my blog and this plugin is a great time saver to me.

Stage 2. Enhance Commenting Systems Front End

Brian’s Threaded Comments is a great replacement for standard comments template and gives people the ability to post replies not only to the post itself but also to other comments and in my personal blog it increased the amount of participation by allowing direct conversation.

Comment Love is a fairly new plugin that detects the commenters blog feed and adds the latest post from the author’s blog with a full link to at the end of the comment. This plugin takes the idea of link love to the next level and is responsible for nearly doubling the number of comments on my own blog.

Live Comment Preview generates auto preview of comments below the form and is one of my favorites, as it allows you to instantly see what your comment will look like. Anytime you can provide visual enhancement – you can increase the number of comments and this plugin does just that and does it well.

Subscribe to Comments is a plugin, I personally think should be integrated into the core. As a blogger I visit and comment on many blogs and I love the option to subscribe to comments on threads that caught my attention and allows me to receive notifications when new replies are posted. This plugin is a must have as it not only makes it simplier for your visitors to participate in discussion – it generates repeat traffic for you!

Once you complete installation and configuration of plugins listed above – your commenting system is taken far beyond its original design and your blog is a lot more interactive. But what perhaps is even more important you have just simplified many tasks for yourself and added new means of traffic generation.

While there are many more plugins that can be used to improve the commenting even further and I discuss many of them on my blog, plugins above I consider essential to every WordPress blog and hope you find them useful as well.

Have you seen a huge traffic spike coming from StumbleUpon recently? If not, this is for you. Many of my posts do get stumbled and some of them pull in a really massive traffic spike. Here is a screenshot from Google Analytics that shows the latests spike:

On Sunday, November 18^th, I published my ranking of Blogs about Blogging and StumbleUpen users obviously liked it. Plus, my daily traffic rose significantly from that day on.

How to start with StumbleUpon
It´s quick and easy, just go to stumbleupon.com and register with them for free.

After that, you can download their toolbar, which is available for both Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers.
The toolbar provides with several buttons, but the most important ones are these:

Now, you can stumble every webpage you like, just with a click on the blue thumbs-up button which says: I like it. Other users who have similar interests now get showed that webpage. Users are being shown new website, every time they click on the Stumble!-button.

Getting traffic from StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon is known for delivering huge amounts of traffic in short terms of time. If you get connected with other users sharing the same interests, you get more traffic as your friends will be shown your stumbled webpages first. As you are reading my blog, I´d assume you are interested in my topics, so feel free to visit my StumbleUpon-Profile and add me as a friend.

It´s no problem with stumbling you own websites, though some users don´t like it. Be sure to stumble only pages which provide value to the community.

Stumblers will come to your site and tend to rate it within a few seconds. So make sure a few points the serve them well and get the most out of this traffic.

• Make sure, there is a lot of content on your site, which attracts these user and cannot be scanned with one short visit. Chances are, they will come back later to read more of your writing.
• Remember to provide visible possibilities for a quick subscription to your RSS-Feed or your via E-Mail.
• Do not overload your page with ads and other crappy stuff, which can make your site look unprofessional.

What others wrote about StumbleUpon
Let´s collect the best articles of the blogosphere about StumbleUpon. Have you written an article about StumbleUpon on your blog, or know someone who did?
Please contact me with the link and a short 1-2 sentence description of the post. I´ll assemble them and will publish the whole list next week. Let´s create the definite resource list.

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.

What does duplicate content mean, why can it be dangerous for your search engine ranking and how to avoid creating duplicate content?

There has been a very intensive discussion about duplicate content in the last few years. It has become a big problem for some site owners, mostly because they just did not know about the problem and even that they were actually running into it without knowledge. So let us first take a closer look on what this problem basically is.

What is duplicate content?
Search engines are constantly trying to improve the quality of their results as they want to provide the user with content which fits best to his or her search term.
If a search engine is indexing a webpage with content which is duplicate to content on another site, they would waste space in their index database, processing power and time on indexing this content once more. So they tend to decide which of these two (or sometimes even more) pages with the same content on it seems to be the most important one. The other pages might not be indexed and can therefore not be found by users of this search engine.

How to avoid duplicate content?
Most websites can be reached via more than one URL, http://www.domain.com AND http://domain.com - This can be a problem with search engines treating those versions of the URL as two different domains, which will result in content existing multiple times. This can be solved easily, you just have to add the following to your .htaccess-File:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Read here on drostdesign.com how to implement this to your site. Try it with my domain, just entering marcorichter.net into your browser will redirect you to www.marcorichter.net as a result of the above changes to my .htaccess-File.
Additionally, if you are using Google Webmaster Tools then you can tell Google which domain you prefer as your main URL.

Is WordPress a problem?
WordPress is giving you several capabilities of managing the content of your site and can be considered being some kind of content-management-system. But some of these features may cause trouble for you as WordPress could render almost 100% of your content as dublicate content. Oleg Ishenko of seoresearcher.com has written a very detailed article on how to make your wordpress blog duplicate content safe. It is definitely worth reading if you are running WordPress and are new to the duplicate content issue.

Maybe you are a more visual person, you might rather like viewing a video on this. Here is one from Michael Gray from Graywolf’s SEO Blog explaining how to avoid duplicate content in your wordpress blog.

What is behind duplicate content?
The way, search engines try to recognize duplicate content and how they try to rank the right pages, but not the copy cats is somewhat technical and not so easy to say, as each search engine will have its own way to handle this. If you want to know more about the background of this, Todd Malicoat at Stuntdubl SEO is providing some great background research on How to Remedy Duplicate Content and Magical % Thinking. Great article, thanks Todd.

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

Each and every time, we all spend much time on writing posts for our blog. Then it comes - the magic moment, when the post is finished and you are about to hit the publish button to let the world know your newest thoughts.

But wait! We want our readers to actually read that post and maybe respond to it. Let´s take a few extra moments to check the post again before publishing it.

Spell Check
Nobody is perfect and we are all making mistakes all the time. Please spend one or two extra minutes to spell-check the post you have spent so much time on writing it, before hitting the publish button. It is so easy and it makes your readers feel a lot more comfortable while reading your post.

There are several ways to spell-check your post quickly, over at lifeiscolourful.com you can find detailed hints on browser- and online tools which help you avoid grammar mistakes in your posts.

Check Your Images
Darren Rowse taught us to use images in our posts, to take them to a new level recently.
Putting images to your posts grabs more attention for it especially in the RSS feed they make your post stand out from other long long lists of pure text.
Be sure, you are tagging your images for more traffic as I recommended it an earlier part of this series.

Use the post-slug Feature
By default, if you are using an optimized permalink structure, WordPress uses the post title for creating the posts URL. Therefore this posts URL should be …/things-to-do-before-hitting-publish.html, but it´s not. I have used the post-slug feature to change it.

So this posts URL actually is …/publishing-posts.html. Why did I do that? I wanted to reduce words in the URL which are of no use for search engines. Many of these words I used as the title for this post, won´t be used by people searching for such information. This posts URL has now just 2 word instead of 6 which rises their relative value for search engines.

Link to Older Posts
As your blogs archive grows bigger with every new post you write, you will find more and more possibilites to link to some of your older posts when mentioning their topic. I have done this here in this post a few times.
Try to find these possibilities and add a few links to some of your older posts whenever possible. This will not only add some context to your post, but it might also encourage your readers to visit some more pages of your blog.

Plus, search engine spiders will follow these links and crawl your old posts again. This can help you rankings for posts which do not have many incoming links.
Some of readers might also be somewhat new to your blog. This makes a great opportunity to show them some of your popular posts from the past. Not every new reader is going through maybe hundreds of posts when he or she discovers your blog.

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.