Blog moved to http://ouronlineworld.blogspot.com

Hey everyone, it has been a long time since my last post here. I've decided to move this blog to http://ouronlineworld.blogspot.com. This new blog will continue to post new tips about blogging but I'll be adding some news of the current event. Feel free to visit, and the principle of the new blog is to share, so drop in comments and discuss the posts.

RankChecker Firefox plugin

If you have followed my blog for a while, you would have noticed that there are some tips and tutorials on how to improve your blog’s ranking in search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN). Now today I wanted to share this Firefox plugin created by seobook.com that could track how well you rank on search engines (and whether or not your all efforts give expected results). RankChecker can display your blog’s rank on each keyword you specify. The screenshot below shows Rank Checker tracking this blog’s rank in Google for the keywords I specify.

To install Rank Checker go to the official website http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker and follow the instructions given there. After installing you should restart your Firefox or else the plugin will not work. Before you launch it for the first time, you should configure it to get the most accurate data. Go to Tools > Add-ons. From the given list select RankChecker and click on ‘Options’. The option window should appear. What you need to do is to tick the ‘Don’t use Google personalized search results if any’. This will prevent RankChecker to obtain the results that have been personalized by you, in many case this will alter the real rank of your blog. One more thing is to set the ‘Delay between queries’ to be no less than 2. The smaller the value, the faster RankChecker obtains the results, but this may cause Google (or any other search engines) to block you. The full explanation can be read at seobook.com.

Using the extension is pretty straightforward, just enter your blog’s URL in the Domain text box and the keyword in the ‘Keywords’ box. Try not to use the http:// prefix for Domain, it will cause several errors. You can add a keyword and a domain one at a time, but if you want to check one domain for several keywords, use the ‘Add Multiple Keywords’ button. Hit the ‘Start’ button to start the check. After you are done, you can save the result by using the ‘Export results to CSV’. RankChecker will generate a .csv file which you can open using Microsoft Excel or any other spreadsheet software.

And before I forget, RankChecker will display a ‘-‘ in case your blog ranks below the top 200 for the keyword. Now armed with this information, it should be easier to push your blog even higher to the top of the search results!

Tips to increase blog traffic

Does your blog lacking traffics? Here are simple tips you can use to significantly increase your traffic. Some of the tips in the list are either based on my own experience or researched from the 'Net. Ready? Here we go:

1. Participate in conversations – What I mean by conversation could be as simple as a comment to a mailing list. For starters, comment on other’s blog and leave your URL in the comment. You can also participate in discussion forums. Try to join the Google Blogger group or Bloggerforum, and under every post you made, leave your blog URL there. This technique is proven to be very effective to kick-start your traffic.
2. Write good contents – I know that this is an *ancient* trick, but it still works, believe me. By writing many good stuffs, people WILL come back to read more. 3-5 posts per week is ideal to grab traffics, but that depends on what you are writing about. If you are reviewing automobiles, 1 post per week is enough. But if you are blogging about the local news in your state, I would recommend 5-7 posts per week, as news is always updated fast.
3. Reply to reader’s comments – When a reader leaves a comment at one of your post, MAKE SURE THAT YOU REPLY IT! This is very important to build trust between you and your readers. They wouldn’t want their comments to be ignored. And besides, people will come back to your blog to see if the comment have been answered or not. If not, the chances are that they wouldn’t want to come back for a second time.
4. Shorten your feeds – This little tip, although frequently underestimated, could give quite a boost to your traffic. How it works is actually very simple. When you write a new post, be it only two or three paragraphs, the readers who followed you will only see the ‘excerpt’ of it, and to read it fully they will have to visit your blog. Simple right? For Blogger users just go to Dashboard > Settings > Site Feeds, and choose ‘Short’ in ‘Allow Blog Feeds’.
5. Allow readers to bookmark you – Put a button that could let your readers to Digg you, or to save your blog in their Delicious bookmark. Buttons like ShareThis works well with blogs. People will be able to see you and hopefully visit it. See my other tutorial here to create your own ShareThis button.

Well, that’s all for now folks. Hopefully this 5 tips could give a boost to your traffic, but one thing for sure: it won’t happen overnight. You must work hard for it. I’ll post more of these soon, so stay tuned!