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:
Write informative articles about your niche so people will link to you. This is call link-bait.
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.
Join forums that are related to your niche. Set up your profile there so your signature link will point back to your website/blog.
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.
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.
Sign up for Google Alert with the keywords of your niche. That is how you can find relevant websites/blogs to comment on.
Become an expert of answering questions in Yahoo Answers. If necessary, you can provide helpful links back to your website/blog.
Participate in Google Group and Yahoo Group and have your signature link pointed back to your website/blog.
Make sure every website/blog of yours has 404 search friendly page. This will help your potential customers to find related articles.
Build an opt-in form of collecting potential customers in your niche. As some experts said, “Money is in the LIST”.
Provide RSS or any other social bookmarklets to allow your visitors to react with.
Submit your website/blog to directories of your niche. Moreover, you can even submit your RSS feed to RSS directories.
Sign up for Squidoo and Hubpages, write about your niche, and have links pointed back to your website/blog.
Use robots.txt file to control certain files if you don’t want your website/blog to end up with duplicated contents.
When you create your articles, make sure you have your keywords written within the title. Good headlines will attract more potential customers.
Create a sitemap and submit it to Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
Exchange your link with the relevant websites/blogs. Overall it will help you in a long run.
Nowadays video marketing is a very popular way of promoting your website/blog.
Sign up a Free account in Craigslist.org, and post your website/blog within your ads. Make sure you don’t spam.
ProvideGoogle 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.
I know nowadays many blog software and websites have built-in atom/rss feed; but I have a BANS site which did not provide neither atom nor rss feed. So I want to build one that visitors can subscribe or bookmark my site.
In order to build one, I found out that I have to create a rss.xml file and upload it to my BANS directory in my web server. You can name whatever name you preferred to that file. I then put the following format in that file and save it. See below:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”ISO-8859-1″ ?>
<rss version=”0.91″>
<channel>
<title>Name Your Feed Here</title>
<link>http://www.yourdomainname.com</link>
<description>Description of Your Feed Goes Here</description>
<language>en-us</language>
<item>
<title>Article Title Goes Here</title>
<description>Description of Your Article Goes Here</description>
<link>http://ww.yourdomainname.com/Article’s Permalink Goes Here</link>
</channel>
</rss>
This is only one item feed; meaning you only have one article in it. If you want to have more items, you can add more. Make sure you change the red color parts to suit your needs.
After that you can check it out from a feed validator to see whether it is a validated feed or not. Just type your website’s url in the text field. If no errors, then you’ve just created a validated feed for your website. Not quite! You still need to present it on your web page so that people can react with it.
How can you implement a rss feed to your web page?
Here is how: You need to save an icon either looks like or in your images folder on your server. Then put the following codes in your header of your website (mostly an index.php file or a header.php file):
<a href=”http://www.yourdomainname.com/rss.xml” title=”Subscribe to my feed” rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml”><img src=”http://www.yourdomainname.com/images/rss.png” alt=”RSS feed” style=”border:0″/></a> <a href=”http://www.yourdomainname.com” title=”Subscribe to my feed” rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml”>Subscribe in a reader</a>
It will show up on your website like this: Subscribe in a reader. Make sure you change the red color of the codes to your own domain name and whatever file name you’ve given to your icon image. Good luck!
If you are searching an answer of how to add a sitemap to your blog/website, then this post is for you. Here I’ll talk about how to create a HTML sitemap so don’t confuse it with XML sitemap. See the difference from this post: What is The Difference Between HTML Sitemap and XML Sitemap?
Next follow the instructions in one of the Free sitemap generators to generate a HTML sitemap for your blog/website.
Then log in to your blog/website admin area and create a new page for it.
Every time when you create a new post you’ll need to update your sitemap. I just simply add my new post to my existing sitemap.
That is it. Some people like to place their sitemap in footer. That is because they believe that search engines will last crawl the sitemap before it exits the blog/website. I don’t know it is true or not but it is up to you to take the action.
I have talked about How to Add Google Sitemap to WordPress.com Blog and Submit Your WordPress.com Blog to Yahoo a while ago. Lately I have tried to submit my WordPress.com blog to MicroSoft Network (MSN) but it failed to read the page that I’ve created. So this post is mainly for self-hosting blog/website only. If you want to continue, I will show you how you can submit you self-hosting blog/website to MSN. Submitting your blog/website to search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN can help them index your blog/website efficiently. Thus increasing the visibility of you blog/website to your visitors. Before you want to continue you need to sign up an account with MSN.
Next log in to that account, click on Add a site button to add your blog/website.
Fill in the information in the empty fields. See the screenshot below: Click Submit button to submit your blog/website to it.
It will generate a piece of code that you can add to your blog/website <HEAD> section. See below:
Once you have done that, click on OK button to proceed and that is it. If you want to add more blogs/websites, then you just have to repeat the above steps.
Click on each web address that you’ve just submitted, MSN Webmaster Tools will show you how many pages are being indexed in Summary. Results for page not found (404) are shown under Crawl Issues. Backlinks will show you who are linking to your blog/website. Outbound Links will show you web pages your blog/website are linking to. See also Keywords and Sitemaps below:
Now you can observe how your blog/website does by log in your account regularly.
If you know any other tips that are related to this post, please share them here with us.
A robots.txt file is a simple text file that is used to tell the search engines (robots) of what should not be visited and indexed. However, you can not tell search engines of what to do. A robots.txt should be placed in your root directory of your web server. Each website should only have one robots.txt file. The main purpose of having a robots.txt is to save your bandwidth from your web server, to give you a very basic of protection, to clean up your logs, and to prevent spams and penalties related to duplicated contents.
If you want the search engines to visit and index your site, then you need to use the following instructions to tell them to do so or some people just leave it blank:
User-Agent: * //Here “*” means all robots
Disallow:
If you do not want the search engines to visit and index your site at all, then you have to use the following instructions to tell them not to do so:
User-Agent: * //Here “*” means all robots Disallow: /
Can you see the difference here, the slash after Disallow: makes the opposite meaning.
If you only want the search engines not to visit and index certain pages, then you have to list those pages for them not to do so. See an example below:
Please also note that for the entire website, you may want to use a robots.txt to control it. However, for a single web page, you may want to use a robots meta tag to limit it being visited and indexed; and for a single link, you may consider using “no follow” attribute to prevent search engines to index that link.
Everybody can access your robots.txt file by typing http://yoursitename.com/robots.txt; so you should not list your secret directories in your robots.txt file because some ill-behaved people use some robots to target your robots.txt file for harvesting this kinds of information.
Robots.txt Checker is an useful tool that you can use to check whether your robots.txt is validated or not.
While checking the summary statistics in StatCounter about my website, I discovered that many of my visitors are from foreign countries other than United States. I also have seen many blogs/websites embedded Google translation service with icons of their corresponding country flags. So I think it is very important that you can provide this kind of service for your visitors. Although the translation service provided from Google is not perfect, hopefully Google will improve it further in the future. If you are interested and want to implement the codes on your blog just like mine here. Follow the steps below:
Download the widget codes here. It provides 22 languages with its corresponding flags.
Login to your WordPress Dashboard; click on Design/Widgets.
Click on Add next to text; you should see text widget is added to the right sidebar.
Click on Edit to open up its text area; put the above codes there; give a title if you wish.
Adding a favicon to your blog/website is one way to express yourself. It tells people a little bit about your blog/website too. Professional blogs/websites will never leave it out. If you don’t know what a favicon is, it is a 16×16 pixels or 32×32 pixels image (icon) that is displaced in your browser’s address bar. Check the screenshot below:
I just added a favicon to my WordPress blog. Now it is your turn to add yours. If you don’t know how, the following steps could be useful:
First you need to have your image ready in your PC (personal computer).
Second visit FavIcon from Pics and follow its instructions there to create a favicon.ico image file.
Third download favicon.ico image file to your PC and unzip the file.
Next upload the unzipped favicon.ico image to public_html/wp-content/themes/your-theme-name/. Make sure you change your-theme-name to be your real theme name.
Next login to your WordPress Admin Dashboard; click on Design/Theme Editor/Header (header.php).
Then insert <link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”<?php bloginfo(‘template_directory’); ?>/favicon.ico” /> in your header.php file; more specifically between <head></head>.
Finally save your header.php file.
If you use Internet Explorer as your browser, then holding Ctrl and hit R at the same time to reload your blog/website. If you use Mozilla Firefox as your browser, then holding Ctrl and hit F5 at the same time to refresh your blog/website. You should be able to see a favicon which is next to your URL now. However, some people’s favicon may not be shown immediately.
Update: This is for full version WordPress blog only. If you have a WordPress.com blog, this will not apply to you since you don’t have access to all the files.
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:
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:
I’ve created a file named google2ae4cd3d07afcb8a.html.
(google2ae4cd3d07afcb8a.html is given by Google. You’ll get your own)
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)
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.
The question is “Are you allowed to have a stat counter on your WordPress.com blog?” The answer is “Yes”. You can confirm it from WordPress.com Forum here. Now you find out you can add a stat counter on your WordPress.com blog. The next question is how can you implement it? These are the steps I set up mine on this blog:
First register your preferred Free stat counter. I heard StatCounter is pretty good. So this is the one I’ve got.
Second login to your StatCounter account; create My Project for you blog/website and get the code; here you can decide whether you like your stat counter being visible/invisible.
Third login to your WordPress.com Dashboard; click on Design/Widgets.
A new window will open; click Add on Text button on the left side; Text button will be added to the right sidebar.
Now open the Text button on the right sidebar; copy and paste the code you’ve got from your StatCounter account; click Change to close it.
Arrange the Text button to wherever you prefer; make sure you click on Save Changes button to save it
It is that easy. See mine on the right upper side corner.
Update: The image showed up when I first published this article. However it disappeared when I reloaded the blog. I wonder what the cause is. Although the image didn’t show up, the tracker is working.
Update: The image showed up again after I’d changed my Security Program from my PC.
YouTube.com is an interesting site where you can broadcast yourself, your friends, or your family in videos. I tried to find out how to post YouTube Video in WordPress.com blog. I came across 4 New Ways to Embed Video which shows details of how to implement YouTube code in your WordPress.com blog. Here is another related article showing you how to post a YouTube Video in you post. If you use new Blogger, find out how to implement it from this article: How Can You Post YouTube Video in New Blogger? If you use WordPress.org blog, here is the way to go: Posting your videos with WordPress. The following is the YouTube video that I figured out how to post on my WordPress.com blog. What do you think?
or 
in your images folder on your server. Then put the following codes in your header of your website (mostly an index.php file or a header.php file):
Stumble It!
