How to get Google to send Traffic to your WordPress Blog
by JPM on Aug.30, 2009, under Blogging, Traffic
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.


September 9th, 2009 on 2:54 am
Thank you, thank you, thank you, THANK YOU for this incredibly clear and helpful posting. I too had a “DOH!” moment when I realized my privacy setting was not allowing search engines.
I downloaded all the plugins you suggested, but when I go to my google webmaster site, it still says “Site Not Verified.”
If you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them! Otherwise, I will keep playing around.
Thank you again for having SUCH a helpful site!
September 9th, 2009 on 12:41 pm
Hi Jennifer.
Many thanks for your kind words.
I’ve just written a post which may help you. have a look at this post here and let me know how you get on.
Cheers
John M