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How to get Google to send Traffic to your WordPress Blog

by JPM on Aug.30, 2009, under Blogging, Traffic

fast 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.

Google started sending traffic over night.

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2 Comments for this entry

  • Jennifer Locke Whetham

    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!

  • JPM

    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

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