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Somethings happened with Google, it’s almost stopped sending traffic to my Netbook-Experience.com blog.

The change happened on the 4th of June, where previously the majority of my traffic came from Google, suddenly Google started sending the site less then 10 hits a day.

Interesting referals from my old Blogspot netbook blog more then doubled, as if Google starting sending more traffic to that site, even though that site just has links through to the new Blog.

After a bit of research it looks if Google has altered it’s algorithms.  Some Bloggers have gained and some have lost out. That’s the problem of having a monopoly I guess – when it comes to Web Traffic google are out by themselves. I’m just watching to see if Traffic picks up again.

There may be times  you need to translate a blog post into a different language .

Perhaps you need to target a particular audience or you need to quote text from a site in a different language but either way there are sites that can help you.

One example of this is the Google translation service .

Its simple to use and offers translation of over 50 languages, so if you find yourself in need to translation services then this is a great tool

Google Insights is tool provided by Google for seeing popular searches and trends.

If offer powerful filters so that you can see results based on types of search (eg web, image etc), locality, topic and time frame.

One of the most useful tools is  that it allows you to see breakout search terms, thats search thats have suddenly gained a huge increase in popularity.

You can use Google Insights to see popular searches in your websites field, this could be an incredible tool for reaching more readers.

Following on from this article I thought I would see which days are the busiest for Internet traffic to my sight.

The general opinion across the Internet is that weekends are the quietest time for Web hits but my original investigation for Septembers traffic on Netbook-experience.com showed that Fridays were the quietest.

How that I have more data to examine, 3 months on Netbook-experience.com and 1 complete month for Techplay-experience.com I wondered if my results changed.

Here are the results:

As you can see Tuesdays and Thursdays are the quietest but Weekends continue to be amongst the busiest day.

In this post I asked how long it would take before Google would start to send traffic to my brand new site Techplay- experience.

Last night I received  my first  traffic from a Google search, 8 days after the first post was made. I suspect this would have been quicker if I had been able to put more content on line at a quicker rate.

At least this proves that the process works.

I’ve previously written about the difficulties I had in getting Google to send traffic to  My Netbook-Experience site. I eventually made a break through and managed to get Google to send me traffic by following these instructions.

With this is mind I thought I would investigate how long it would take for Google to crawl through my blog and send me traffic if I follow these instructions right from day1.

I’ll give it a go and report back here how it goes.

Many web sites and blogs use Google Adsense as a revenue stream to monetize their pages, but how many actually read the terms and conditions that you are required to accept when you sign upto Adsense?

One of the terms and conditions is that you need to publish a Privacy Policy on your site. If you haven’t done this before then you can view an Adsense compatible Privacy Policy Template  by clicking here.

Make sure you follow those Adsense  Terms and conditions or you might get a nasty suprise.

I thought it would be Interesting to see if any days generally bring more traffic then others. The general opinion around the Internet is that Weekends are generally bring less visitors then week days, so I thought I would see  if the traffic to my Netbook Experience Blog reflected this or not.

So using Google analytics I pulled of a report showing how many visitors visited Netbook Experience each day during September.

I’ll repeat this expercise for a month to get a better picture overall but the results for September are shown below, and show that Fridays are on average the Quietest days for my site and Sundays are the businest days.

The average number of vistitors every day in September: 

Fridays: 27.75 visitors on average
Thursdays: 30.75 visitors on average
Tuesdays: 33 visitors on average
Wednesdays: 33.4 visitors on average
Saturdays: 35.75 visitors on average
Mondays: 38 visitors on average
Sundays: 40.25 visitors on average

Here’s an update on my first big Word Press Project Netbook Experience.

Originally a Blogger hosted Blog, my Netbook Experience site aims at providing Hints and Tips for getting the best user experience out of the Acer Aspire One Netbook.

Since 03/08/09 :

• Netbook-experience.com has received 1,767 hits from 1106 different visitors.
• During that time 822 hits have come from my old blog - after google un-banned me, I put links from the old site to the new site.
• Google has sent me 470 visitors directly. (Google only started sending me traffic on the 29th of August)
• Aspireoneuser.com sent me 122 hits
• getsatisfaction.com have sent me 65 hits

You want a frequently read blog, with good sticky content and returning visitors who find your articles interesting, but how do you do it?I’ve been giving this some thought and here are my ideas.

I use this blog to record not only my blogging process but only to write about topics which genuinely interest me, for example my posts on Terry Wogan, and I’ve noticed that these posts and articles  bring in visitors from Google, that means not only does it interest you, but it interests other people.

These readers have visited your blog and found content which interests them, that means that there’s a possibility that they will return again, it would be very unusual for a topic to interest a blog author and nobody else out there on the Internet. The more content that you write on your blog, the more content there is for for Google to see and send visitors to you.

It is important not just to blog about anything for the sake of it, blogging should be an enjoyable experience and if your content doesn’t interest you then writing it is going to be tedious, and if it doesn’t interest you then why should it interest anyone else.

I’ve run a number of blogs and most of them are hosted on blogger. Following the incident when Google Banned Me and I thought that I had lost everything I’m looking at transferring all my blogs from Blogger to self hosted WordPress Blogs.

One of the issues that has concerned me was how time consuming the process could be, either by re-typing the posts or copying and pasting the text, and exporting and uploading pictures.

However I’ve just discovered that WordPress has a built in Import tool that can easily and quickly important the contents from other blogs on different hosts – including Blogger.

To import a Blogger blog into a WordPress Blog:

• Go to the tools section of your Dashboard
• Select the Import option
• A list of compatible blog hosts will now be displayed, select Blogger.
• You will now have to authorize permission for your WordPress Blog to see your Blogger account, just follow the on screen instructions which involves entering your user name and password.
• A list of your blogger blogs will be displayed, find the blog you want to import into your WordPress blog and click the import button under the magic button heading.

The import process only takes a couple of seconds, and you may still need to do a little work on formatting, but the process is certainly is much much easier

I thought I would give an update on my first big Word Press Project, Netbook Experience.

Originally a Blogger hosted Blog, my Netbook Experience site aims at providing Hints and Tips for getting the best user experience out of the Acer Aspire One Netbook.

The majority of the posts from the old site are now copied across to the new site, and traffic is now hitting the site (after some trouble shooting). So wheres my traffic coming from:

Since 03/08/09 :

• Netbook-experience.com has received 1,317 hits from 823 different visitors.
• During that time 681 hits have come from my old blog - after google un-banned me, I put links from the old site to the new site.
• Google has sent me 292 visitors directly. (Google only started sending me traffic on the 29th of August)
• And between them aspireoneuser.com and  getsatisfaction.com have sent me over 140 hits

Google Webmaster tools is a great free service provided by Google and allows bog owners and webmasters to check the the indexing status of their sites.

For me it gave me a view of which sites google could see, and to also make sure that my Site Map was being picked up correctly.  

Integrating Google Webmaster Tools into your WordPress Blog is easy through the use of the Google integration toolkit plugin.

After you register for the Google Webmaster Tools service and log in there is an option to add a new Website, enter the URL of the site and click on continue.

You will then be given a meta tag line of code, copy the long string in between the speech marks (shown after content=)  and paste it into the Meta tag value box in the settings screen of the Google Integration Toolkit plugin.

Make sure that the Meta Tag button is highlighted and save the settings.

Choose the option to ‘varify this site’ on the Google Webmaster Toolkit  main screen.

Don’t forget to:

•  make sure that your robots.txt file is ok – you can use Google Webmaster Tools to create one for you. 
• Use the XML-Sitemap plugin to create your sitemap.

Here’s an update on how much traffic my Netbook-experience blog is getting, and also how much of an impact Google has made since it started (finally) sending me traffic.

There are 2 graphs shown below (you can click to enlarge them), the top graph shows how much traffic the blog has recieved since it launched and the second graph shows how much traffic Google has sent during the same time frame. You can see that the general trend to the blog is positive and that Google has had a positive impact on the blog.

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.

  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.