Web Site Promotion

One feature that is valuable in getting the word out is making it easy for people to subscribe to RSS feeds. When I speak of RSS I mean RSS or Atom feeds. Read about RSS - probably more than you want to know.

Blogs and many web sites use RSS feeds to communicate new information, such as press releases, new software, and upgrades available. It should be as easy as clicking on your favorite RSS reader logo (or if it is not listed click on the universal RSS icon and paste it into your reader) and go. I try and list the most common readers without getting out of hand.

A help page on feeds is a necessity since many people still do not know what feeds are or know enough about feeds to feel comfortable subscribing to them.

If you are a user of WordPress for your blogging, one of our favorite syndication plug-ins is subscribe me. Once activated there are many choices of syndication buttons to choose. They show up on the sidebar under a ‘Syndication’ heading.
For particular sites containing RSS readers such as Bloglines, Google Reader or Newsgator have buttons that can be added to your blog or website so users can subscribe to your feed. Note that most personalized home pages such as MSN, Google, or Yahoo have ways of adding RSS feeds to them.

Here are some examples of how an RSS feed button can be added to your blog/website. Click on ‘Add’ and it will take you to the appropriate site so you can create your own syndication code then cut-and-paste into your blog or website area.

• Add to Google
• Add to Yahoo!

Services such as FeedBurner, Squeet, or FeedBlitz can handle syndication for you. Some blog software, such as WordPress, have plug-ins to reroute your feed to FeedBurner where the subscriber then chooses which reader to use. A nice side effect is you can monitor your subscriber base.

If you choose to add feed subscription yourself you can add the universal RSS feed button or a text-only link which is directed to FeedBurner. When a subscriber clicks on it, FeedBurner takes over and offers various subscription buttons.

Doug

Just having a web site or blog is not enough. People need to know about it. Spreading the word about your blog or web site takes time and perseverance to monitor the effectiveness of your efforts.

Consider putting your web site and blog in email signatures, business cards, address labels, and letters. I have seen automobiles and trucks with web addresses on them…even t-shirts! A tattoo may be going too far.

Posting articles on news sites like Digg helps spread your URL around. It can be a lot of work (and luck) to get a big story on Digg. You never know.

Of course you can go crazy and post it on a billboard along a busy road.

Just mentioning your web site or blog URL in conversation may get some results especially if it is easy to remember. Often when I mention web sites people are taken aback: oh, you have a web site?

If you have a brick and mortar store, posting the web site near the entrance will bring some exposure. Printing your site on each receipt will get countless eyes looking at it. Offer a discount or some other incentive on the receipt along with a promotion code to track where it came from. Advertising your web site on grocery carts may be another idea. Local chambers of commerce generally have web site listings of area stores.

Leaving useful comments on a forum will instill credibility and hopefully people will seek you out. Putting a URL in a post may get tagged with a no-follow tag so search engines will not follow it…but people may.

If you have an email list, send out an announcement of your blog or an important posting on it. Many times people like to forward useful emails.

Link exchanges are popular but diminishing in value for search engines. Make sure the link you exchange is a quality link. You are known by the company you keep.

That is it for now. There are many other ways of letting the world know of your online presence. I’ll post another batch of ideas later…

Doug

We all know how important it is to tell everyone your blog or website has updated information. One popular way is to ping, ping, ping. Your feed may eventually be discovered but the time lag may be several hours or days…or never. One thing you do not want to do is ping a ping server several times for the same update - this will be construed as ping spam and your site may be blacklisted.

Once a feed is updated either by adding a post on a blog or updating your feed file on your website (if you have one) the rest of the world needs to know about the new information. This is done by letting ping servers know an update has occurred. Once a ping server is updated the feed aggregators (reader) subscribed to it are notified and the update appears in your feed reader. Most blog software has a way of pinging servers after a post is made though you may not have control over which servers are pinged.

It started out innocently: I wanted to find out which servers were being pinged and IF they were being pinged. I am deciding whether to use FeedBurner to do my pinging, rely on pingomatic which is the default for WordPress blog post, find a new multiple ping service, or let my blog (WordPress based, my own host) do all the pinging.

After looking on the pingomatic web site I could not reliably figure out exactly who they ping, when they ping, and whether the ping was successful…and no way to get in contact with anyone to find out. I assume it is all of their common services and none of the specialized ones but I do not like ambiguity.

more later…

Doug

The title tag is one of the more important items in not only search engine attraction but user attraction, too. Typically the title’s contents are displayed on a SERP (search engine result page). Also the title is shown in the browser title bar and when a bookmark is created.

Unfortunately, blog software treats the title tag in different ways. Some do not even create a title tag while some put in various entries.

In WordPress the default title is the blog name followed by page information. The problem with this is that the closer to the front the more important the information according to search engines. Plugins exist, such as optimal title, to make the blog title and individual post titles better suited for search engines.

Check your blog and individual posts (look at page source) to make sure the title tag has what you think it has. You may be surprised.

Doug

Since I am using WordPress (WP) for blogging I will discuss it. The nice thing about WordPress is I can put it on a subdomain on my hosting site and have complete control over it…but that is another story.

Many people still want news delivered via email rather than using a feed. I say offer it to them. One way (using WP) is to use a plugin but that requires hosting your own database of emails. One of my blogs is using an email plugin which I like because I do not have to worry about privacy issues. This plugin will be analyzed in a later post.
On this blog I use FeedBurner to handle my email subscriptions. The service is activated and HTML is provided to cut and paste into the blog (sidebar.php for WP). It is easy to set up and maintain which is a big plus. FeedBurner also shows how many subscribers are present (either via email or RSS feed).
I always subscribe to my own feeds to make sure they get publicized correctly and in a timely manner. Also remember to click on the link because sometimes it may not work.

Doug

Was I the only one using a web ring? I cannot think of the last time I saw a web ring on a web site or blog - especially a professional one. They were all the rage in the 90’s but now they are pretty much dead. Today I decided to can the web ring from dougthecook.com. It has not made any noticeable difference on incoming traffic, so goodbye web ring.

Doug