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.

  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”

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.