For those of you who don’t use FireFox, you should check it out.  It is a great alternative to Internet Explorer, and it works great for the majority of sites on the internet.  One thing I love about it is the ability to download and use Add-ons.   You can get everything from Flickr and YouTube add-ons, to Google notebook add-ons, to blog posting add-ons.  They’re simple to install, and very easy to use.

One add-on I’ve been using that has really helped with the SEO work on my websites and blogs is called SeoQuake.  While everyone will not be able to appreciate all that it offers, if you are doing SEO work to promote your site, you should give it a try.

Once SeoQuake is activated (it is easy to turn on and off)it does a couple of things.  It will place a small bar under each search result, and it will place a small bar at the top of each page you visit.  It give a lot of information about Googles Page Rank, Alexis rank, internal and exernal links, and keyword density of the site you are visting.

Another tool it offers is the ability to see whether comment links are set to nofollow.  I wrote yesterday about this, and SeoQuake gives you a quick visual look at whether the blog you are commenting to has nofollow tags turned on.

Check out the information page, then decide for yourself if this is something useful for you.

There is a bit of a disconnect between what SEO gurus say, and the reality of blogs.  I don’t think it’s intentional, but it does exist.

SEO 101 says that a great way to build back links is to comment on other blogs that are relevant to your blog.  You get to have a backlink included with your name, Google picks that up, and over time, your Page Rank improves.  Here’s the disconnect: WordPress defaults to setting a “NoFollow” on Comment links.  Most blog owners either don’t know about it, or they never got around to removing the no follow.   That means that although other readers can click through to you blog, the search engine spiders will not follow that link back to you.  Even the big boys like ProBlogger use the nofollow block.

The reason WordPress sets comments to nofollow is simple; comment spam.  Some sites, especially porn sites will run programs that look for blogs that they can post comments that will allow the link back to their site.  So the simple solution is to stop all comment links.  Unfortunately, that punishes your readers who you are encouraging to participate on your blog.

I’m experimenting with removing the nofollow on my comments.  Links within the comment will still have a nofollow block on them, but not the signature.  That means you will be able to take advantage of the backlink potential of posting comments, just like the gurus promised.  If the spam becomes overwhelming, I may have to revert back, but for now, we’ll see how it goes.

The plugin I am using to make this happen is: remove-nofollow.zip. Just load it up, activate it in your Plugins menu, and the nofollows will be removed from your comment headers, while leaving the block on links within the comments.

I’ll keep you updated on how it works out.

I mentioned in my last post that I was going to start righting about how to improve your search engine results, and attract more readers to your blog. So this is the first step in that process.

One of the things I love about the blogging community is the spirit of cooperation that exists. There is a sort of camaraderie among fellow bloggers that you don’t always find in other areas of life. That doesn’t change the fact that other blogs are your competition, especially blogs that are in your niche. Read the rest of this entry »

I wrote before about joining in the Thirty Day Challenge. While I was a little moire than 30 days in reaching my goal ( it was 40 days, and I made a little over $50), it was an eye opening experience in how to drive traffic to a web site. The biggest benefit for me was that it started me on a journey of learning how to compete with other web sites that are in a similar niche.

Let’s be honest, we’re in this because we want readers to our blogs, otherwise we would just be writing in diaries. Read the rest of this entry »