How to Promote Your Website/Blog?

Looking for free tips of how to promote your website/blog? Over the years I’ve learned tips all over the place from Internet on how to promote a website/blog. I think it is better listing them here so whoever stumbles on My Internet Stuff site will find them useful here:

1. Write informative articles about your niche so people will link to you. This is call link-bait.
2. Submit different version of those informative articles to major article directories. If people like your article, they will post it in their sites. So you’ll get one-way link even for Free.
3. Join forums that are related to your niche. Set up your profile there so your signature link will point back to your website/blog.
4. Sign up social bookmarking sites and post your links there. Although most of them don’t provide do-follow links, still you’ll get traffic from them.
5. Find relevant websites/blogs to comment on. If allowed, leave your link there to point back to your website/blog. Most website/blog owners don’t mind that as long as what you said is natural and relevant to his/her site.
6. Sign up for Google Alert with the keywords of your niche. That is how you can  find relevant websites/blogs to comment on.
7. Become an expert of answering questions in Yahoo Answers. If necessary, you can provide helpful links back to your website/blog.
8. Participate in Google Group and Yahoo Group and have your signature link pointed back to your website/blog.
9. Make sure every website/blog of yours has 404 search friendly page. This will help your potential customers to find related articles.
10. Build an opt-in form of collecting potential customers in your niche. As some experts said, “Money is in the LIST”.
11. Provide RSS or any other social bookmarklets to allow your visitors to react with.
12. Submit your website/blog to directories of your niche. Moreover, you can even submit your RSS feed to RSS directories.
13. Sign up for Squidoo and Hubpages, write about your niche, and have links pointed back to your website/blog.
14. Use robots.txt file to control certain files if you don’t want your website/blog to end up with duplicated contents.
15. When you create your articles, make sure you have your keywords written within the title. Good headlines will attract more potential customers.
16. Create a sitemap and submit it to Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
17. Exchange your link with the relevant websites/blogs. Overall it will help you in a long run.
18. Nowadays video marketing is a very popular way of promoting your website/blog.
19. Sign up a Free account in Craigslist.org, and post your website/blog within your ads. Make sure you don’t spam.
20. Provide Google Translate for your foreign visitors so you can keep them informed. Although Google Translate is not 100% accurate, it is better than nothing.

I am sure there are more ways of promoting your website/blog than the above list. Maybe you’ll tell me more in the comment section? Do you like the list above? How helpful is it to your website/blog? Feel free to voice your opinion here.

What is The Difference Between HTML Sitemap and XML Sitemap?

There are two types of sitemaps in general; namely HTML (Hyper Text Makeup Language) sitemap and XML (EXtensible Makeup Language) sitemap. Do you want to know the difference between them? If you do, then read on…

What is HTML Sitemap?

HTML sitemap is used to list all hyperlinks of different sections and pages of your blog/website. These hyperlinks are normally listed hierarchically and they may provide description for each link. It is no doubt that adding a HTML sitemap to your blog/website will help your visitors navigate and find information easily. So HTML sitemap is primarily created for humans. Although a HTML sitemap is created for your visitors, indexing bot such as Googlebot might have a better chance to crawl your first-time-missed links again since all the files are well put together in your sitemap page. Check this blog’s sitemap to get a general idea of how a HTML sitemap looks like. You can create your own HTML sitemap from HTML Sitemap Generator here.

What is XML Sitemap?

XML sitemap lists URLs (world wide web addresses) for your blog/website in a special format. See the table below for a XML Sitemap with one single URL:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?> <urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″> <url> <loc>http://www.yoursite.com/</loc> <lastmod>2007-12-29</lastmod> <changefreq>monthly</changefreq> <priority>0.5</priority> </url> </urlset>

It allows webmasters to inform search engines about URLs in your blog/website for easy indexing. XML sitemap is created for search engines but not for humans. Submitting a XML sitemap to search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN will not only help your blog/website being indexing quickly and efficiently but also increase your blog/website’s visibilities in search engines as well. For a full version WordPress blog, you can use Google XML Sitemaps plugin to do the trick for you.

Do you have anything to say about this topic? Or any questions?

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How to Get Your WordPress.com Blog Verified By Google?

A couple weeks ago, I wrote a post, How to Add Google Sitemap to WordPress.com Blog?, which showed you how you can submit your blog’s feed to Google Webmaster Tools account. Now you might wonder how you can get your WordPress.com blog verified by Google too. It seems it is impossible to do that because we don’t have controls of our files; but hope is always there. The article, Get your WordPress.com Blog Google Verified, will guide you the way of how to do that. Still I want to show you the way I got my WordPress.com blog verified here:

• Go to Google Webmaster Tools account. If you don’t have one, get a Free one here.

• Once you got one; sign in with it.

• If this is the first time you sign in, then type your blog’s/website’s URL (the address for your blog/website) in the text field and click on Add Site.

• Under Verified? click on Verify button

• A new window is shown; saying Verification Status: NOT VERIFIED.

• In the drop-down list; choose Upload a HTML File.

• More information will be shown here. Here you have two choices to submit your blog/website:

1. I’ve created a file named google2ae4cd3d07afcb8a.html.

(google2ae4cd3d07afcb8a.html is given by Google. You’ll get your own)

2. I’ve uploaded the file to http://yoursitename.wordpress.com/ and can view http://yoursitename.wordpress.com/google2ae4cd3d07afcb8a.html in my browser.

(Make sure you replace yoursitename with your own domain name.)

• Since you know we don’t have controls of our files; so we’ll go for the choice 1.

• Go to your WordPress.com Dashboard, click on Write/Page to create a new page named http://yoursitename.wordpress.com/google2ae4cd3d07afcb8a.html. This page can be empty. Make sure you change yoursitename to be your own domain name. (Keep it private once Google has verified your blog/website)

• Go back to your Google Webmaster Tools account and click on Verify button.

Now wait for Google to update your status. Google Webmaster Tools will inform you once your blog/website are being verified. After you’ve succeeded, you will enjoy reports about your pages’ visibility on Google.

Comparison of Google Blogger and WordPress.com Blog

As a new blogger, you probably like to choose a Free blog service to get started. Both Google blogger and WordPress.com provide this kind of Free service you can get. However, you may want to find out the similarities and differences between them before you decide to pick one. Since I own both Google Blogger and WordPress.com blog, I can tell you what the similarities and differences between them:

Google Blogger	WordPress.com
Requires minimal HTML knowledge	No need to know anything about HTML
Allows CSS edit	Don’t allow CSS edit unless you upgrade it
Allows Google AdSense	Don’t allow any third party codes
Allows you to edit HTML code	Can’t access any files
Allows you to add your own footer	Can’t do anything about the footer
Can’t create any pages	Allows you to create pages
Can’t import other blogs	Allows you to import other blogs
Layout is narrow but can be modified	Has more variety wider themes
newNo trackback service instead has backlink service	Has trackback service
No comment spam protection	Offers anti-spam protection (Akismet)
Can add images & videos	Can add images, videos, audios, and media
Labels (can be Categories/Tags) is available	Tags and Categories are available
Can add your own widgets	Some themes came with certain widgets. newAllows you to add text widgets
Hard to redirect to your paid-hosting server	Can easy redirect to your paid- hosting server
Allows you to schedule future-dated posts (just added by Blogger)	Allows you to schedule future-dated posts
newHas OpenID Service	newHas OpenID Service
newNo undo/redo function in its editor	newHas undo/redo function in its editor
newNo table function in its editor	newNo table function in its editor
newComment editor is in-line (just added by Blogger)	newComment editor is in-line
newAllows you to moderate comments	newAllows you to moderate comments
newOffers feed service	newOffers feed service
newNo Blog Stats, no Blog Suffer, and no Tag Suffer services	newOffers Blog Stats, Blog Suffer, and Tag Suffer services
newNo sign up service	newAllows your readers to sign up

These are all I can recall so far. Make a wise decision before you choose one. For me I prefer Google Blogger since it allows me to hack the codes the way I like. I also like my self-hosting WordPress blog too for it also allows me to study those PHP files there. However, if you are thinking to temporarily use a Free blog service and eventually transition it to a paid-hosting service. Then I suggest you to get WordPress.com blog since it will make your life easier when one day you are ready to pay for your own hosting. WordPress.org blog doesn’t give those limitations listed above from WordPress.com. See The Difference Between WordPress.com and WordPress.org here. WordPress.org gives all the freedoms you need; no limitations such as posting third party codes. Moreover you can have full access to all the files.

Update: I’ll add updates to this post whenever I recall some features about Google Blogger vs. ordPress.com. More updates have been added. See the items marked new.

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How Fast Google and Yahoo! Indexed My New Blog!

Wow! How fast Google and Yahoo! indexed my new blog! I’ve just started on April 13, 2008 (exactly two weeks’ ago). When I typed site: myinternetstuff.wordpress.com in Google Search Engine. I could see a list of all My Internet Stuff sub-titles indexing at Google; see the screenshot below:

Click on the picture to enlarge

Yahoo! also indexed my new blog so fast but did not list as many sub-titles as Google; see the screenshot below:

Click on the picture to enlarge.

I don’t know for sure whether fast indexing has something to do with my submission to Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo! Site Explorer. Anyway, I am happy about it.

Update: Google just indexed What Can You Do With Your API Key? – a post I wrote today (4/28/2008)8) less than one minute. I am really amazed.

How to Add Google Sitemap to WordPress.com Blog?

Update: Although the following method works for me, it gives me errors occasionally. Now I submit sitemap.xml to Google Webmaster Tools account. Since then I’ve never got errors and more URLs have been indexed. Maybe this is the best way to go.

Adding your blog/website’s feed to Google Webmaster Tools account is one way people believe will help Googlebot crawling your blog/website efficiently. If you own a WordPress.com blog and want to add a feed to Google Webmaster Tools account, then you may find the following steps useful:

• Find out your feed’s URL from Feed Validator here, where URL means a World Wide Web address.

• Your feed’s URL should look like this http://yoursitename.wordpress.com/feed or http://yoursitename.wordpress.com/?feed=atom, where yoursitename should be replaced with your own domain name. I submitted both and both of them work fine for me.

• Go to Google Wesmaster Tools account. If you do not have one, you can sign up a Free one here.

• Add your blog URL first if it is your first time you login to your Google Webmaster Tools account.

• Under Sitemap click on Add

• A new screen will show up. Click on Add a Sitemap

• Choose type…>Add General Web Sitemap

• Enter feed or ?feed=atom in #3. If you want to add both, make sure you add one at a time.

• Click on the button Add General Web Sitemap to submit it.

Now you have to wait for Google to update your status. If no error shows up, then congratulations! You have successfully added your blog’s feed to Google Webmaster Tools account. Check it out regularly to make sure everything is OK.

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