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This is one thing i noticed today, MyBlogLog account subpages are getting quite a bit of a PageRank boost. I’m not the biggest MyBlogLog user, i just visit people that visit serverdome, but today while going through the option pages i noticed that the serverdome.org entry page has a PageRank of 1.

Now you’re probably thinking that’s not such an amazing thing and PR1 backlinks are a dime a dozen, but let’s compare a few things for a second. My own page which is a month old is at PR1, whle at the same time Stephan Miller’s page has a PageRank 4 profile. Stephan is about a hundred times more active on the service than i am. After a while, all those links from communities he joined and widget views start to add up, giving a PR boost to the entry page. Adding all your blogs to your page will help pass PR juice to every site linked from there.

For comparison, this blog’s page on BlogCatalog has a PR3. Too bad that the actual link from the subpage is coded in javascript and will not pass PageRank juice from BlogCatalog to blogs.

MyBlogLog observations

1. Whether links from widget views on blogs pass juice to your MyBlogLog page is debatable. The widget displays data through some funky javascript so i don’t think they do.
2. The blog link from the profile page seems to pass PR juice to your page, if you have more blogs, add them there.
3. You can’t use html on your profile description. (I was going to be evil and link to some serverdome articles there with good keywords, my brilliant plan ruined!)
4. Links from other users messaging you on the sidebar are NoFollow-ed, no sneaky spamming that way.

StumbleUpon
“Channel surf” the internet based on interests you select and site reviews and votes of other users. If you don’t use SU yet, download this now.

SEOQuake Toolbar
If you’re even a little worried about optimizing your blog for SEO you need this. Pagerank, Alexa rank, keyword analysis and more. I’ve mentioned this one before and I’ll mention it again because i love it’s functionality.

Del.icio.us Extension
This ads del.icio.us functionality to firefox, on the fly tagging of websites.

Another Delicious Sidebar
A sidebar for accessing del.icio.us bookmarks.

I use these plugins on this and other sites and highly recommend them.

Feedburner Feedsmith
Redirects RSS requests to your Feedburner feed.

Fuzzy recent posts
Display recent posts on the sidebar.

Live
Shows real time visitor statistics for your Wordpress blog.

Popularity Contest
Display your most popular posts. Highly customizable.

Subscribe2
Manage e-mail subscriptions.

What would Seth Godin do
Shows a greeting to new users and invites them to sign up for the RSS feed

All In One SEO pack
Search Engine Optimization for Wordpress.

WP-Cache
Ultra fast caching plugin.

Akismet
Spam blocker.

Adsense Deluxe
Ad management plugin.

Getting a domain with an existing Google Pagerank and several backlinks might be better than building up PR yourself, it takes considerable time and effort to get a domain from zero to a respectable point. With these tools you can see listings of expired and soon-to-expire domains, and place a backorder to grab the domain as soon as it expires.

Network Solutions expiring domain names
Alphabetical lists and a search engine for domains under the Network Solutions hosting company.

Inet411.com’s Expired domain with PR list.
This tool will also display Pagerank for each domain and allow you to place a backorder on the domain. There are several PR6 and PR5 domains on the list.

Domain Broadcasting expiring domains search tool
Allows advanced search and listing for registered users only, only shows results for the first 6 pages if you are not registered for a pay account. Use the other tools first.

If you are planning on getting an expiring domain you should check for a fake Pagerank with this tool.

Writing consistently in English has been the hardest thing about blogging, everything i write always seems better in my head than when i type it down. There is no real solution when English isn’t your first language, you just need to constantly practice and evolve your writing to a point where you’re happy with it. Below are a few ideas you can use to better your grasp of the written English.

1. Think in English

Just do your thinking in English instead of your own language. This is hard to get used to at first but it will help to get your mind in the habit of writing more than a few sentences in English.

2. Watch movies without the subtitles

Again, this will help you to get your mind to work in English and not your native language. Listening to spoken English will also help you catch new words and how they are used.

3. Do not translate what you write in your own language

You will always find inconsistence when translating between your own language and English. Think about how the text will seem to an English reader, not yourself.

4. Have a native English speaker go through your writing and make suggestions.

This will help your writing the most, and the more people read it, the better. You will often get different suggestions from different people depending on their expectations and what they are used to reading

5. Read other blogs

There’s a certain style and jargon that goes through every niche that might take you some time to pick up, especially on some concepts that don’t translate well between languages. Take sailing for example, a native English speaker might use a word to describe something that will only seem natural to English speaking readers and translates to a completely different thing in another language. One of my favorite blogs is CopyBlogger, which has excellent style on his articles.

6. Read books, but don’t use book writing as a blueprint for blog writing

Books will help grow your vocabulary but “bookish” writing is very different from blogging, which is more like a conversation between writer and readers.

7. Proofread. Then proofread it again.

I never proofread enough, and end up noticing spelling errors a few minutes after posting. This is important for any blogger, even more so when English isn’t your first language.

8. Stop using the dictionary.

Just keep writing what seems natural for you, and keep the dictionary and thesaurus for when you’re completely stuck.

9. Sign up for a forum and start threads.
Forum posting will help you practice your writing in a much more relaxed environment and quickly compare it to other posts. And forum posts are generally much closer to the average blog post than a book or tv and will help you work out a more fluid writing style.

Don’t forget to proofread

These are just a few general guidelines that worked for me, it does not mean that it will work for everyone, but it’s a good starting point to improve your writing. The most important thing to keep in mind is to never stop practicing writing better. As your experience grows so will your writing improve and your writing will be more fluid and natural.

What is bounce rate?
A bounce is basically a visitor that loads a single page on your web site and then leaves the site without clicking anywhere. This would describe most Digg and other social voting sites really. If your bounce rate is 70%, out of a hundred new visitors 70 loaded just one page on your site, then left for good.

Why i love StumbleUpon
Ten days ago i wrote an article that was stumbled by many users, sending a spike of traffic from StumbleUpon.com. The article was first linked by (i think) problogger.com and later spread to many other blogs. This led to the article getting ‘liked’ by about a dozen stumblers. Those dozen stumblers sent a spike of 300 unique visitors my way. I kept getting about 15 referrals a day from StumbleUpon until there was a second, smaller spike of stumbles a week later, sending an extra 200 readers to the entry.

After each spike of traffic from SU i checked the analytics referrer logs for Su traffic which reported a 39% bounce rate from stumbleupon visitors. So from the 600 readers, 400 viewed more than that one page that got stumbled and checked out more from my site. In comparison, traffic from shoemoney.com, my biggest referral traffic, bounced at a rate of 75%, and Google organic traffic at 68%.

Why does StumbleUpon traffic has such a low bounce rate? It’s all about boredom.
StumbleUpon has a huge advantage over digg traffic, the next cool site is always a link away. With Digg, you have to press the back button more than once to return from a visited link to the Digg main page. StumbleUpon has it’s own toolbar which is always available no matter the page you’re reading, so an SU visitor doesn’t have to worry about typing URLs or hunting down bookmarks to return to SU’s main page.

StumbleUpon traffic is highly targeted
Digg-type sites focus on one large mob of users with mostly random interests. True, Digg does have categories but most of the traffic will come from the Digg main page. Stumblers configure their profile and only see sites they are interested in. This explains the phenomenal bounce rate for SU traffic.

What i could have done better: Display popular posts
When the first wave of stumbles hit i was using a layout that did not display top or related posts at all, and i am certain having either would have reduced the bounce rate even more.

Add a “stumble this” button
I should have added a StumbleUpon graphic after the entry or even a line reading “If you enjoyed this please Stumble it” to remind people to thumbs-up the page.

Twelve simple ways to promote your new blog.

1. Add an About Me/Contact page
2. Submit to Google, Yahoo and MSN
3. Replace the default template with something better
4. Register your feeds to as many rss directories as you can.
5. Install All in one SEO and Akismet spam filter
6. Sign up at technorati and claim your blog
7. Comment on five other blogs with subject similar to yours
8. Add the address to your forum signature and reply to 5 threads
8b. If you don’t frequent a forum with interests close to your subject, start now.
9. Stumble your main page on StumbleUpon
10. Submit an article to Digg & Reddit, and ask some friends to vote it up
11. Add your blog to a blog directory
12. Sign up for Google AdSense, even if you don’t plan to have ads right away

Separating trackbacks from comments helps the readability of your comments section and keeps things clean. There is no way to do this using a plugin right now, but Michael from Problogdesign describes how to do this by editing the template files.

Many people choose to block trackbacks altogether for cramping up their comment section, i prefer to leave them on as a thank you to people that linked me and having them this way helps keep things tidy.

Search Engine Optimization has become such a debated topic, it’s hard to find a technical blog that hasn’t touched the issue in the past (and i see no reason why this one should not). If you’re just beginning with SEO for your blog the four tools below are a great way to get started.

SEO Quake add-on for Firefox and Internet Explorer

The SEO Quake addon for both the major browsers helps your optimization efforts. From the SEO Quake toolbar you can see the Pagerank, Google index, Google linked pages, and similar results for Alexa and Yahoo for the page you’re viewing, as well as SEO information for links in search engine results. One interesting feature is an automatic keyword combination extraction from whatever page you’re currently viewing.

All in One SEO Pack Wordpress plugin

This plugin for Wordpress will optimize your blog to be crawled and indexed by search engines. It protects you from duplicated content, optimizes the entries titles and automatically generates meta information. The way Wordpress manages it’s categories and permalinks is already excellent and makes it very easy for search engines to crawl and index your site, and this plugin will help fill the gaps between some of the more technical aspects of SEO.

Website Grader SEO tool

This online tool will analyze your site on the fly and provide a report on where the site is lacking in Search Engine Optimization. It did miss some minor details when querying serverdome.org but provides good suggestions on where to focus you optimization efforts.

Google Adwords Keyword tool

This is a free tool by Google to assist advertisers using its Adwords network but we can use it for our own benefits. You can see exactly how competitive a keyword or a combination is, how many people search for each keyword, even how find out trends in keyword queries. While it isn’t a dedicated solution to optimizing keywords, this tool by Google is always my first stop when researching keyword SEO.

Conclusion

Like i mentioned in the title, the links above are nothing more than tools, and SEO has as much to do with tools and software as it has to do with creativity and knowledge. Third party software and plugins can help so much, but operating and writing with SEO in mind will take you to the next step. Blogs structure is generally excellent for SEO and most bloggers need do do very little to have their sites indexed and crawled by search engines.

One final tip

I’m surprised this is not mentioned more often in wordpress tutorials. When you first install wordpress, change the permalink structure to something simpler. For example yesterday’s post on ad placement had the following url structure: http://www.serverdome.org/how-the-top-bloggers-display-their-ads-percentages-and-numbers/. Having the name of the post as the adress instead of a string of seemingly random characters will help both search engines and readers. To change the permalink structure just log in to your wordpress installation, go to Options, Permalinks and as a custom permalink structure enter “/%postname%/” (without the quotes).

Digg.com is the mothership of all the web 2.0 social bookmarking sites and can be a way to reach a huge number of people. In fact, digg is so popular that a story on the main page can get you more than 50.000 visitors in less than 24 hours. From all the social bookmarking/link sharing sites that appeared with web 2.0, Digg has the possibility to direct the most traffic in the shortest amount of time. In fact, traffic can so much that sites crash and go off line shortly after appearing on the main page, coining the term “The Digg effect” when this happens. If you’d like an overview of what happens to your site when you get on the first page of digg i reccomend these two sites: The Digg Effect: A Deconstruction, and The digg effect - a visual analysis.

How it works

Digg users submit stories that appear on the “upcoming” part of Digg. Registered users can vote, or digg, a story if they like it. Stories with many diggs show up on the main page of each category, and the top stories from each category on the site’s main page.

One of the advantages of having a story appear on the main page besides the obvious digg effect is the indirect traffic from blog than link to digg stories and widgets that display the latest stories from the site.

My own experience

During the last week i have been submitting stories to Digg. None of my stories made the first page, in fact none managed more than 5 diggs, but i still received a decent amount of traffic from the search and upcoming pages. Digg accounted for about 15% of my total referral visitors these ten days. Strangely enough, much of the incoming traffic came from their search engine and generally had a lower bounce rate than other pages. This chart shows digg traffic in green compared to traffic from other sites.

Some numbers

September 15 to September 24 traffic from external sources: Referring sites sent a total of 502 visitors via 30 sources
Digg traffic: 77 visitors (15.16% of total refferal traffic)

Keep in mind that this during a ten day period, with minimal work except for submitting the article. It is not a huge boost to overall visits, but submitting to digg is a great way to get your site out there and getting it noticed, even if it never goes anywhere beyond a handful of diggs.

Downsides to Digg traffic
Most people point out that digg traffic is usually single page views, users click on the digg links, quickly scan the page then press the back button to get back to digg. Despite that, the sheer volume of traffic one can get from even a couple of hours on the digg front page is staggering and more than makes up for it.

Using Digg
Signing up for a Digg.com account is instant and allows you to submit your own stories to digg or vote for stories already on the site. Stories you dugg and submitted appear on your profile page. When you are logged in you can use the “Submit New” button to submit a story. Digg automatically checks submitted stories for duplicates before displaying them on the site.

Get your friends to digg your stories
Digg will not penalize you for having your friends sign up and digg your entries, in fact it promotes networks of friends digging up stories. Stories submitted and voted on by your site friends appear on the “Friends’ Activity” after you log in.

Use digg!
Even if you don’t have the time to be an active contributor, the ten seconds it takes to submit a story can help you get traffic for your new blog, even if it never goes anywhere beyond the upcoming stories page. Aiming for hitting the main page on Digg is a noble (and rewarding) goal, but the upcoming pages will also help increase your readership and provide new readers.