First of all…let’s talk about the hyphen between self and published that I left off in the title. Don’t ask me why, but an underscore doesn’t interfere with a searching spider.
However, the spiders don’t care for hyphens, colons, semi-colons and etc.
A few days ago I wrote a post with a spider analogy. The reason spiders were on my mind is because about 8 days ago, my daughter loaded a new traffic tracker to my web site. It keeps account of 4 items; visitors, page views, spiders and feeds. I’d been feeling depressed that my traffic, for no apparent reason, dropped by one-third. The old tracker wasn’t working. And I soon discovered I had more visitors than I’d known.
I only had a vague clue what a spider was or does. Yesterday there were 85 spiders visiting my site. That number was low. Most days it’s been closer to 200.
Who cares? Right? Apparently we all should if we are want to drive traffic to our websites. And why is that important?
Search Engine Optimization
When my traffic dropped recently, my daughter’s first thought was that I’d committed a cardinal SEO sin. It turns out there are plenty.
And sure enough, just before the drop I’d blogged a post which had multiple links…a no-no.
And it turns out that my habit of making every word in bold because it’s easier to see is a BIG no-no. So I went back to many of my previous posts and deleted the bold and left only keywords highlighted.
But blogging isn’t our only resource to reaching an audience we hope one day will buy our books. In my case, while I’m multi-published, I haven’t put anything new out for a VERY long time. I’m writing a high-concept story with a co-author and when it comes out, I’m hoping my efforts blogging will pay off.
A long time ago, I had a very big following on MySpace blogging. I often had 4-500 daily visits to the blogs I posted and consistently hit the MySpace Most Popular Blogs
lists. I met many people through those quirky blogs that I’m still in touch with…loved it!
I have a good Facebook presence…but what the heck has happened to Facebook. I think my 1,000+ subscribers, among my 5,000+ friends get my feed, but I don’t know. The messed-up algorithms are discussed as the reason we no longer can see feeds that were once a daily treat.
I’ve become somewhat of a Twitter maniac. In the four months since I’ve become a regular blogger again, my Twitter followers have increased from less than 400 to almost 2,600. And I’ve tweeted almost 13,000 times…up from less than 100. And I can do it spending less than 15 minutes per day there. It takes a little longer now that I’m getting direct tweets…but I’m grateful for them.
If you are self-published you CANNOT ignore Social Media. Through Triberr or at the bottom of my blog posts I can link my posts in seconds to StumbledUpon, LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook, and MySpace. Yes, I remain ever hopeful that MySpace will one day be resurrected.
I’m on several Yahoo Loops, Smutketeers, Goodreads, and I’m more than likely forgetting to mention something. If this seem obsessive, I assure it that it is not. It a necessary part of the new social game.
This time of the year, I have little time to be social…my business card calls me a Senior Tax Advisor 5. It used to call me an Enrolled Agent until the year my mother died and I was two hours short on my continuing education to keep my license. I have a new license, but not as prestigious as the first. 
I’m glad to have a chance to remain somewhat social. What about you?
The results of my first official week with my newly installed stats-meter…
2,823 visitors
18,086 page views
12 hours of over-time at the tax office with an hour drive everyday…and add almost two additional hours for the accidents stopping traffic this week.
And I still got to spend time last weekend with my fabulous grandson! You can be social even when you have little to NO time.
You mentioned something that goes against what I’ve read so I’m hoping you can unfurrow my brow. I thought we were supposed to have links in our blogs because it directed more traffic to our site. Is there an amount that’s too much or should we do none at all?
Thanks for any help, Brit.
I can answer that with a link…
Google wants people to use them…so they can penalize blogs who give away the links that will circumvent using them.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/25-ways-to-get-penalized-in-2012/47245/
“Partnering with other websites to exchange links with each other leaves a very noticeable footprint to the search engines, which may choose to penalize these obvious manipulation attempts in the SERPs.”
An internal link to another of your posts is permissable.
I’m going to ask my SEO Queen, Tiffany of NatureMoms fame to comment…
You have to be very careful nowadays with who you link to and quantity of links on your site. Google is hip to to the fact that people are buying links left and right to influence search rankings and they are cracking down on this every month but sadly many innocent sites gets slapped along with the bad. Linking to yourself is perfectly fine and recommended. Linking to other sites is fine too as long as you don’t go crazy with it and only link to high quality sites. It is also important to concentrate on social media and reaching people that way as well as building a subscriber list. Google can have a bitch fit any moment and take your traffic away. Write for yourself/your readers and not Google but write with an eye to what might upset them too. Always have backup plans. Putting all your eggs in the Google basket is not a good idea.
Wonderful post . I totally agree with all the points and constructive criticism. You have got a new reader and I am going to check your blog very often.