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It’s finally happened – Google has started sending me traffic to my Netbook Experience Word press blog.

I thought I would summarise the steps taken as it has taken a while to achieve with my Word Press blog – it was certainly easier using a blogger hosted blog as most of this process seemed to be automated.

Step 1: Tell Google your site exists, go to Google’s add URL page and enter your sites details.

Step 2: Register an account with Google Webmaster tools. This will give you a meta tag so that you can be tracked by Google’s tool set.

Step 3: Install the Google Integration Toolkit plugin for WordPress. This plugin is useful to integrate a number of different Google tools into your blog i.e. Webmaster toolkit, Adsense, & Analytics.

Step 4: Install the XML-Sitemap plugin for WordPress. This plugin is useful as it automatically creates and updates a XML-Site map of your site. Sitemaps are useful as they help search engines like Google crawl through your site.

Step 5: Install the All in One SEO plugin for WordPress. This plugin allows you to potentially  increase your page ranking by incorporating SEO techniques into your blog. When you create a post a new section is visable which allows you to fill in a few details for SEO, the plugin does the rest.

Step 6: Create some internal links. Google appears to like internal links, so I wrote a blog post which linked to every other post.

Step 7: Allow Google to see your site. Make sure your robots.txt file allows google to crawl through your site – Google WebMaster tools can easily provide a working robots.txt file. There is also an option in the privacy settings of WordPress to block or allow search Engines, make sure this is set to allow   .

Google started sending traffic over night.

Here’s a quick way to see what pages from your site google has found.

In a google search window type:

site:domain.com

eg site:netbook-experience.com

This might be a usful tool to see why google isn’t performing well for you.

Whilst interrogating the Google webmaster tool kit to find out where my google  traffic is, I made a couple of important discoveries:

1) you can find my pages by searching in google

2) You can only see the pages that are linked to directly from the front page.

I hadn’t appreciated that Google uses internal links when crawling through sites. To try and put this right I’ve written a post which links to every other post on the blog.

I’ll report here when I see if I get better results from Google.

I thought I would give an update on how the site development is going for my new Netbook Experience site.

I’ve now copied across 21 Articles from my old blog to the new site, and I’m also pleased to have 21 (non spam) comments so far forming some good discussion.

In 21 days since the site went live  I’ve had 457 hits from 298 visitors. I’m quite pleased with that for my first month, but as google is sending me no traffic where is this traffic coming from???

My top sources are:

My old blog sent me: 257 hits – Everytime I moved a post to the new blog I put a link on the old site.

The aspreoneuser.com forums have sent me 63 hits – I updated my forum signiture and posted on there.

Getsatisfaction.com has sent me 32 hits – one of the solutions I posted solved a common problem and a reader posted about my site on there.

So far so good.

  This may be one of those DOH moments. As I’ve mentioned before I used to get a significant amount of traffic from Google to my old Netbook Experience but ever since I moved to a WordPress blog I’ve not had a single hit from them.

I’ve tried several steps to try and change this, I’ve added SEO plugins and XML site maps to my Blog, I’ve altered my robots.txt file, but although Google webmaster tools was showing me that Google was picking upkeywords for my blog I still no joy and no traffic from them ….and then I saw this setting in my blogs Privacy Settings.

The default setting looks to be block all search engines and ping utilites. DOH. I’ve now changed my settings to allow my site to be visible to search engines and I’ll see if this brings an improvment and I’ll report back here.

So the question is “Why isn’t google sending me traffic to my WordPress Blog?”

The Answer might be “Let it”

As of today I’m still not getting traffic from Google to my Netbook-Experience blog, so I’ve been looking into how to improve this. I’ve installed 2 popular Plugin’s my blog to try and help Google see my Blog.

1) Google XML Sitemaps: This plugin creates a XML site map of your WordPress blog, XML sites maps improve search engine optimization of a site by making sure that all the pages can be found. When you create a post, the plugin can update the Sitemap for your blog and then let the major search engines know that it has changed.

2) All in One SEO Pack: This plug in automatically implements SEO into your blog. You need to enter important key words and a description when you publish a post but other then that the process is automated. SEO is important as it helps achieve better results in search engines and bring more traffic to your site.

Both the Plugins can be installed through the search facility on the Admin Dashboard on your WordPress Blog.

I had been trying a few different plugin’s to implement Google AdSense and Analytics, with varying success – especially with AdSense ad’s not being relevant to my Blog.

I’ve found a different plug in called Google Integration Toolkit, you can find it by searching the available plugins through the admin dashboard.

In one plugin you can set your Analytics Code, set your tracking code for the Google WebMasters toolkit and also insert a couple of settings to help your AdSense plugin.

Certainly since I made the change Adsense is definitely becoming more appropriate to my content.

I was really starting to get concerned that google wasn’t sending any traffic to the ever expanding Netbook  Experience.

On the old blogger site google send traffic almost on day one, I imagine that with it being a google service a lot of the background tasks are performed automatically.

I registered for the google webmaster tools site so that I could see if google was crawling my site ok. I could quickly see that google could see the blog but was being blocked from crawling through the site by the default robots.txt file. So google couldn’t see any of my blogs content.

To resolve the issue the google webmaster toolkit provided a download of a new robots.txt file, this file was then uploaded to the root directory of my site, and I’m hoping that this solves the problem.

I just need to wait until Google next crawls through my site to see if this makes a difference

Kontera is an easy and attractive way of adding contextual advertising to your site or blog.

After you add the Kontera to your site, some of the keywords in your posts will have a blue hyperlink underneath them, and when hovered over an appropriate  advert is overlayed above the text, you then get revenue when the advert is clicked.

Adding Kontera to Blogger sites is easy as you have direct access to the HTML code, but to WordPress sites it’s a little more difficult.

I’ve found a plugin which makes it a little easier called Ad Rotator, which you can search for through the WordPress Admin dashboard.

After you have installed and activated the plugin you can add the Ad Rotator Widget to your layout in the Widgets tab. The purpose of the Widget is to rotate through different html scripts, but if you only add one script to it then that script gets used all the time. Copy your Kontera code into the widget then it gets activated every time someone views your site.

After a few days break I thought I would provide an update on much traffic is going to my Netbook Experience Blog.

On the third of August I started adding links from the posts on the old blog to the copied blogs on the new blog.

Since then  98 visitors have been sent from the old blog to the new blog.

On the 8th of August I made some changes to my posts on the Aspire User Forum (as described in this post). Since then 26 users have arrived from that forum.

I’ve also had 13 hits from GetSatisfaction.com a site where people post solutions to common problems, a visitor to my blog saw that I had posted how to solve a common problem and posted a link there.

What is disappointing is that Google hasn’t sent me a single visitor yet, where as my old blog got plenty of traffic from Google, so I’ve manually tried to add this site using the google add url tool, so I’ll see what happens.

My increase in traffic

A lot of the traffic that came to the the old Netbook Experience site was from the Acer One User Forum where I’ve contributed and posted links to my site.

To try and re-direct some of the traffic to my new site I’ve taken the following steps.

1) Updated the link in my signature to point to my new site. This way every post I’ve made now contains a link to this site.

2) I’ve edited any post that contained a link to a  post at my old site that has been moved to this site with the new URL.

3) I’ve made a post telling people that my site has moved. I had previously posted about the blog, so I just added a reply explaining about the move and asking for links to other AA1 blogs.

I’ll report back here how well it works.

I’ve added another post to Netbook-Experience.com

In today’s post, I’ve explained how to install Picasa on the Linux Version of the Acer Aspire One.

The next step for me is to look into the Monetization of my blogs, there are 2 methods that I’m investigating at the moment, Adsense & Kontera.

There are different ways to implement either method in WordPress, so I’m currently investigating which method generates the best results.

I’ll also be looking into other methods of using the Internet to generate money.

On Sunday 02/08/09 I had a very pleasant afternoon watching the Scunthorpe and Barton Corps of the Salvation Army put on an open Air concert.

The weather held out and although it was a little windy, it stayed warm and dry.
Normanby Hall Country Park is a nice place to visit near Scunthorpe and very suitable of picnics for the entire family.

The migration from the old Netbook-Experience site to the new Netbook-Experience.com blog continues and I’ve copied another 3 posts across.

Todays new post are:

1. How to install the arcade emulator MAME onto the Acer Aspire One
2. How to improve MAME performance
3. How to watch BBC TV stations on the Web

netbook-experience.com is online now.

The first step I’m taking to get traffic to my new Netbook Experience blog  is to replace the old blog posts with a link to the new post on the new Blog.

So that as visitors visit the old site they get re-directed to the new one. I don’t hope to redirect all the visitors, as I’m sure some visitors won’t click on the link, but some traffic will be better then none.

I’ll report here how well it goes.

Despite my Google Hate, I do like their Analytics service, it’s free and does a great job of tracking traffic. Integration into Blogger was straight forward but how easy is it to add Google Analytics to WordPress blogs….it’s easy

There is a widget availbile for WordPress called

To install the Plugin:

1. From you Blog’s admin Panel click on Plugins.
2. Click on Add New
3. Search for “Google Analytics for WordPress”.
4. The Google Analytics for WordPress will be top of the list. Click on install.
5. When the Information page appears click on Install.
6. When the Plugin has installed click on Activate Plugin.

To configure the Plugin:

1. From the Manage Plugins screen click on the settings option for the Plugin
2. Enter your Web Property ID (you get one of these when you create a profile for your page in Analytics) in the Analytics Account ID Box.
3. Click on the Update Google Analytics Settings box

Job Done

As I continue to migrate the old Netbook Experience site across to the new blog, I’ve added 3 new posts onto Netbook-Experience.com

1. 1. How to install Spotify onto the Acer Aspire One
2. 2. How to install a Flight Simulator in Linux
3. How to install a MMORPG

netbook-experience.com is online now.

Well it looks like my appeal to Google worked and my blogs are back up and running.

Does that change anything – not really, other then it makes it easier to transfer posts across. I still intend to move the 3 important blogs across to their own hosting, as this incident has really concerned me that I could lose everything without warning when using Blogger.

So the plan continues….