I installed Google Analytics on this site today as I'll hopefully be using it on the first of my new 'potential' partnerships, one of which I've already completed a guest post for. There's no point in me doing nothing about it now and then torturing my new partner with tons of questions on how things work when I can use the time now to familiarise myself with tools/plugins/widgets I know I'll be using when we go full steam ahead with the project.

I mentioned a couple of days back that I had now gained direction on where my blog is going and that I wanted to gain the trust of my readers. It looks like I've achieved this, as the site owner has created a WordPress user account for me and I've been adding some content there already. There's a lot more work done on that site than this blog in terms of SEO so I had a look about at what was installed and used it as a guide.

photo credit: marciookabe

When you sign up for Google Analytics, you're provided with a piece of code, simply paste this in to the bottom of your footer.php file above the call to footer and teh closing body and html tags, and you're good to go. I've already got aws stats installed as part of my hosting account so it'll be interesting to compare the two and see which I prefer. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't been looking at how much traffic this site is getting already (the numbers are low ) but I'm starting afresh now with Google, and I'll try and use it as motivation to drive more traffic to this blog.

Next thing I did was install the seo all in one plugin. I configured the all in one seo plugin using this video tutorial as a guide. I should have done this earlier as I'll have to go back through my blog posts and add sef (search engine friendly) titles, descriptions and keywords to each one of them. But anything that gets me more good traffic makes this effort worth while.

photo credit: K2D2vaca

Finally, I added the Google XML Sitemaps plugin which generates a sitemap that is recognised by all the major search engines and makes your blog easier to search and index. The installation is easy, there's some tips here and all you need to do is add two files: sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz to the root of your blog and make them writeable. The sitemap is then auto-generated each time you do a new post. I'll be having a closer look at the configuration at a later date.

One more thing I did do was remove robots.txt from the root of this site. I had i it there to stop search engines indexing this site until I had enough content but it's time to pick up some traffic now, so come on Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask, and the rest of you come and find me...

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 6th, 2009 at 10:36 pm and is filed under Blogging, Traffic, seo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.