05 April 2009

Blog tips, blog tools and the progress I've made so far

I'm conscious I haven't posted in a while, but I'm not going to make excuses. I go on Blogger daily, so there is no reason except this; I'm finding it difficult to get inspiration!

I sit with a note pad, scribbling down ideas and end up screwing it up. This blog business is tricky. Plus, I still haven't really found my niche, like most bloggers do. Although, I'm kind of going for the angle of 'social media experimentation and understanding'.

So in a bid to carve myself deeper into this niche, it's probably worth updating you on my progress so far. Here it is:

Pre March
• Joined social sites: Facebook, You Tube, Friends Reunited, MySpace

Early March
• Joined: Twitter, Blogger, Yammer and Linked In

14th March - 21st March
• Created my blog
• Wrote first post: Social Media... the end of productivity as we know it?
• Set up Google Analytics on blog
• Verified blog with Google Webmaster
• Added Twitter feed to blog
• Added blog URL to Twitter, Facebook, Linked In and MSN Messenger profiles
• Distributed blog via Ping-o-Matic!
• Submitted URL directly to Google, resulting in the blog being crawled the following day

22nd March
• Wrote second post: Dealing with call centres - should we change OUR attitude?
• Started adding labels to posts

24th March onwards
• Wrote third post: Mums on maternity leave - sites to help ease the boredom
• Installed SEO toolbar, what a fantastic find!


The results to date
• 66 visits
• 25 page views - best performing day, 22/03
• Top referrer: blogger.com
• 3 weeks from first post to driving traffic from search engines
• The experiment for my third post seems to be paying off as it's currently my top performing post and is ranked in 6th place in Google for the keywords 'boredom maternity leave'

Blog tools used
Google Analytics
Google Webmaster
Twitter Feed
Ping-o-Matic
URL submission to Google
SEO Book toolbar

What's next?
• Investigate how to produce a sitemap for my blog and sort out the robot.txt file - Google doesn't seem to like the labels on my posts
• Try and increase my blog's PageRank through link building
• Research further the world of social media and how I can harness its power
• Continue blogging

On that note, I best get on with it!

Lou_geek

2 comments:

seo wales said...

The adwords keyword tool shows 28 searches per month for bored+maternity+leave as a nearest match for your 3 keyword string.

The first 1-3 places can expect 4p per click, so about £1 UKP per month. You're sixth on what appears to be a far less valuable keyword group.

Don't be disheartened, just that you may have more luck targetting higher value/volume terms unless you're going for a broad brush approach of having hundreds of sites targetting the long tail.

Oh and Google skips spammy looking footer links like your "labels".

Lou_geek said...

Thanks for your comment seo wales.

I think one of my future approaches to blogging will be to do more keyword research before publishing and therefore will take in to account the factors you've mentioned above. For now I just need to get in to the swing of things! Great info though, so thanks for that.

Yes, I'm trying to understand the value in the 'labels' as Google seems to not like them looking at my results in Webmaster. So I'm not sure what value they hold...

Thanks again,

Lou_geek

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