Surprise! Surprise! My Alexa traffic ranking keeps improving - I mean the Alexa ranking of this site has improved tremendously, from over 5 million to under 280k! [Jan 23 - It’s now ranked at 229,003]

And I want to know where does the traffic come from…

I have been tracking the visitors using MyBlogLog and also my server’s AWstat. But, there is not really such a big jump in the numbers - not so many unique visitors. So it must be repeated visitors and very likely from Kian Ann’s Blog Marketing blog. And this is a good thing. Thank you Kian Ann.

Blog With Wordpress

I believe my switch from Blogger.com to Wordpress is instrumental to this rise in traffic ranking. The trackback and comment features enable me to put my URL when I cited other’s blogs and commented on them. If you have not been using Wordpress, please install it now. It is quite easy. However, if you really need help, consider getting the Wordpress Complete book, click at the picture of the book for more information.

I created this word-cloud site with Kian Ann in early July 2006. It was an experiment to learn how to drive traffic quickly.

So, we thought Singapore blogs is a good niche and we will attract lots of traffic because we know there are plenty of Singapore bloggers - people young and old are blogging or starting to blog. So we started with some famous Singapore blogs such as…
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Wordpress ROCKS! I am totally impressed by Wordpress. It was a breeze to import my existing own hosted version of Blogger.com blog to Wordpress.

I was a Blogger.com fan. You can read about why I like to use Blogger.com at this previous post:Why I Prefer Blogger

I think the main motivator for me to migrate to Wordpress is the new Blogger.com! It is now officially that Blogger Beta is out of Beta. I prefer the old Blogger.com where I have more freedom to customized the template. With the new Blogger.com, I cannot use my own template if I publish to my own server.

And I don’t know when Google is going to pull the plug and kill the good old Blogger.com!

More About Wordpress Blogging

It was easy to migrate the Blogger.com blog to Wordpress blog. However, the template customization is not so simple and easy. As you can see, I am using a modified default template. I have not learned how to really customized the template the way I wanted it - like what I can do with Blogger.com. But, there are many more advance features and advantages in Wordpress that make up for the not-yet-so-customized template.

As far as SEO is concerned, I believe Wordpress can do better than Blogger.com. Just give me some time and I will find my way around to get my template the way I think how a search engine optimized blog should be designed.

1. Efficiency

2. Stability

3. Reliability

It is very efficient engine if your blog entries are short and infrequently, 2 or 3 posts a week or less. It’s stability has been tested by millions of users for many years now. If you can rely on Google to be available online every time you need to do a search, you can expect to same with Blogger when you feel like blogging.

Why I have not started using server based script like Wordpress, b2evo and other CMS?

I tried Wordpress, b2evo, Mambo, Nucleus and etc. Installing them is easy. But when it comes to moving server, you will have to backup and restore the MYSQL database, reinstall the skin and plugins and many other customization. If I do not need to customise, I would not have needed them in the first place - and I’ll be better offer using an easy software like Blogger.

Search Engine Optimization For Your Blog

As for SEO performance, Blogger offers nothing signficant except for the static pages. Wordpress is the preferred platform for those who are concerned about SEO Blogging and for Internet marketers.

For SEO purposes, you will have to take note how your blog engine generates the URL for your post. URL like this:

http://www.contentseo.com/main/index.php?catid=3&blogid=1

will not do as well as, say,

http://www.contentseo.com/search_engine_optimized_content

The SE friendly URL requires mod-rewrite and is Wordpress has this feature.

This is probably my final post for the month of July 2005. For the rest of the week, I will be busy preparing for the Internet marketing and SEO Workshop that I am doing at Singapore Institute of Management.

I have set up an e-group for those who are attending the SEO Workshop this Saturday. As we have only about 6 hours, I decided to get them prepared for the hand-on workshop prior coming to attend.

I intend to help each and every participant to launch One blog and One mini-site. So I will need them to have their content ready and on the day itself, we just use the HTML editor to add in the text, adjust the layout and upload using FTP.

This is what I will be doing for the one-day workshop:

Part 1 - Blogging
1. Use Blogger to blog

2. Submit to blogs directories and search engines to index your blog

3. Search Engine Optimization - Write blog that search engine loves and your friends will read

4. Be so proud of your blog that your friends will ask you to teach them how to blog

5. Use My Yahoo to subcribe to RSS feeds

6. Monitor the traffic to your blog using free software online

7. Put Adsense on your blog to convert traffic to revenue

8. Link your blog to your website to increase traffic

Part 2 - Mini-site
9. Build a mini-site from scratch with free hosting

10. The 8 HTML codes that you must know and use

11. Upload your website using WSFTP

12. Optimize your mini-site for search engines

I have been encouraging friends who wanted to start making money with the Internet to first start a blog. In many occasions, they were skeptical about using blogs to make money.

My reasoning to them is simple. The Internet is a place where people look for information and when one can provide the sought after information, people will come to the website. And one of the easiest way is to use Google Ads to monetize your blog traffic - I call this type of blogging. Adsense Blogging. As traffic grows, money flows…

Here’s an article that will explain how you can possibly Make Money Writing Blogs:

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