Website Grader
Time for some shameless self-promotion. Fellow bloggers often ask by email for suggestions on how to increase traffic to their site. There is no shortage of websites that offer hints on how to increase page rank or improve search engine placement or such like. As valuable as they may seem there is nothing as important as simply and plainly being yourself.
First, write the truth as you see it and write what interests you. Later we can work on technique.
I don't often quote Shakespeare and for that I am much ashamed, we bloggers should do so more often. Shakespeare had a suggestion that was appropriate for blogging as well as for living life:
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
A blog is a personal journal and I write it as if writing to myself. Every post I publish, photos of beautiful women, rants against Islamif*ckation, advice on how to cook the perfect hard boiled egg, even my synopses of Sopranos episodes are articles that I enjoy reading.
When I write for the typical reader I am writing for me. I don't like reading movie reviews so I don't write movie reviews.
Now that said, there are some suggestions I can offer. First, read other bloggers. If they write something you find interesting and you have something to add then blog about that with links back to the original inspiration. I have written over 1143 articles (over 1 million words) in the past 897 days (since 16 Jan 2006) and I doubt you will find more than a dozen that do not link back to someone else's website.
I love pictures. I doubt you will find more than two or three posts without a photo or cartoon or illustration (there are over 3592 images).
Finally, get analyzed. Put your articles and home page through numerous website analyzers. For example: Websitegrader. Put in your website domain name and get back a report with suggestions on how to make your website more marketable, whatever that means.
I got back this report on plancksconstant.org. Here are some salient points:
Website Grade 98 (out of 100)
Google Page Rank 5
Google Indexed Pages 3,300
Inbound Links 177,254
Websitegrader made some suggestions on how to further improve my site, which I will implement in the coming weeks.
Here's a site that analyzes how fast your website loads: Pingdom. The article you are reading now took 2.4 seconds to load. Here's the report. I have over time made improvements to make my pages load faster and hopefully make the reading experience for my visitors more pleasant.
I will stop here for now, but I intend on making this a series. Stay tuned.
